When the Patriarchs Prayed They Were Also Prophesying

The Name in the Blessing

Abraham had not yet left Haran when God spoke a promise so vast it seemed like a speech about the future rather than a command to depart. I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse. The Hebrew leaves those figures unnamed. The Aramaic of Targum Pseudo-Jonathan does not.

The blessings, the Targum says, will flow through the priests who spread their hands in prayer and bless Abraham's sons. The curse will fall on Balaam, the prophet who will curse them and be killed by the sword. Both figures appear in the same divine speech, two hundred years apart in the story's own timeline. The blessing of the priestly hands and the death of the hired curser are already folded into God's word to a man still standing in his father's city.

This is the Targum at its most characteristic. It does not move sideways from the text. It moves forward. The Aramaic translator heard in I will curse those who curse you a precision that the Hebrew left general, and he named the man heaven had already identified.

Return the Wife, He Is a Prophet

Abimelech had taken Sarah into his house in good faith. God appeared to him in a dream and told him he was a dead man. The wife he had taken belonged to another man. Abimelech, who had not come near her, defended himself by his own innocence, and God acknowledged the defense. Then came the instruction.

In Targum Pseudo-Jonathan's Aramaic, God tells Abimelech something that should have been embarrassing. The man whose wife he had taken had lied. He had called his wife his sister. He had endangered Abimelech's household through his own deception. And now God calls this man a prophet, says he will pray for Abimelech's healing, and makes the household's survival dependent on the prayer of the man who caused the problem.

The Prophet Who Caused the Crisis

The Targum does not soften this. The holy one names Abraham a prophet in the same sentence that makes Abraham responsible for the crisis. It was a strange kind of vindication. The deceiver and the intercessor were the same man, and heaven made the second role the answer to the first. The wife had to be returned, but the household could not be healed until the wronged husband opened his mouth to pray for the king who had wronged him.

The prayer, the Aramaic insists, was the point. The prophecy and the intercession were one function. Abraham could stand between people and death because he was the kind of man God listened to, even when that man had just made an embarrassing mistake. The same voice that had lied about Sarah was the voice that would lift Abimelech's house out of the sentence of death, and God arranged it so that the lie and the rescue ran through one throat.

Jacob Knew Before He Said It

The caravan was preparing to leave for Egypt a second time, and Jacob could not avoid Benjamin any longer. The brothers needed their youngest to stand before the Egyptian official whose strange behavior had already cost them Simeon. Jacob knew what it meant to send Benjamin. He knew what he stood to lose.

Targum Pseudo-Jonathan expands the prayer Jacob said before releasing his son. I am now certified by the Holy Spirit that if I am bereaved of Joseph, I shall also be bereaved of Simeon and of Benjamin. Jacob's blessing was not only a father's hope. It was a prophet's statement of what was at stake, spoken under the pressure of the Holy Spirit bearing down on a man who had already lost one son to what he thought was death.

The Targum makes the patriarch's voice in that moment carry two weights simultaneously: the ordinary grief of a father sending his youngest into danger, and the extraordinary knowledge of a man who sees outcomes and says the fearful thing out loud. Jacob blessed against the loss he knew was possible. The Holy Spirit did not protect him from that knowledge. It only gave him the language to carry it.