How Pseudo-Jonathan Passed the Patriarchal Blessings Down to Jacob

The blessings of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in Genesis are usually read as a sequence of independent grants. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on Genesis, the expansive Aramaic Targum preserving older traditions in a later redacted form, reads them as one continuous transmission.

The Targum shows the Holy One making the original promise to Abraham under the stars, watching the same promise flow through Isaac to Jacob in the dew of heaven, and finally arriving in Jacob's mouth as the blessing he passes on to Joseph at the end of his life. Three passages from the Targum trace the chain.

The Stars Abraham Was Asked to Count

Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on Genesis 15:5 records the original promise. The Holy One leads Abraham outside the tent at night. Look up now to the heavens, and number the stars, if thou art able to number them. Abraham looks up. The Holy One says, So will be thy sons.

The Targum preserves the scene almost verbatim. What it specifies is the cosmic register the promise is operating in. Abraham's descendants are being compared not to ordinary objects but to the heavenly bodies, which the rabbinic tradition treated as governed by the highest configurations. The numerical promise, in the Aramaic, is a structural promise. Abraham's seed will participate in the same order as the stars.

The teaching anchors what follows. The blessings that descend through Isaac to Jacob are, in the Targum's reading, the operational unfolding of this original cosmic promise. The stars were the proof of concept. Jacob's blessings are the delivery.

The Dew and the Fountains Given to Jacob

Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on Genesis 27:28 records Isaac's blessing of Jacob, delivered while Isaac was blind and unable to see his son's face. The Hebrew says God give thee of the dew of heaven and of the fatness of the earth, and plenty of corn and wine. The Aramaic expands the description.

The Word of the Lord give thee of the good dews which descend from the heavens, and of the good fountains that spring up, and make the herbage of the earth to grow from beneath, and plenty of provision and wine. The Targum has Isaac invoke the Memra, the divine Word, as the channel through which the blessing flows. The dew is specified as descending from above. The fountains are specified as springing from below. The herbage grows from the meeting of the two.

The teaching has cosmic geometry. Isaac, blind, blesses Jacob through the Memra. The Memra carries the dew downward and the fountains upward. The middle layer, the herbage, is where the blessing's effect becomes visible. The blessing is not a single gift. It is a three-layer hydrological cycle the Memra has installed for the patriarch's descendants.

The All-Sufficient Help Jacob Gave to Joseph

Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on Genesis 49:25 records the blessing Jacob gives to Joseph at the end of his own life. The Aramaic uses the same vocabulary that Isaac had used over Jacob a generation earlier.

From the Word of the Lord shall be thy help; and He who is called the All-Sufficient shall bless thee with the blessings which descend with the dew of heaven from above, and with the good blessing of the fountains of the deep which ascend and clothe the herbage from beneath. The same Memra, the same dew descending, the same fountains ascending, the same herbage between. Jacob is, in effect, transmitting the same blessing he had received from his own father.

And the Targum adds an intimate closing. The breasts are blessed at which thou wast suckled, and the womb in which thou didst lie. The blessing reaches backward to bless the bodies that produced Joseph. The Aramaic translator is preserving the patriarch's blessing as a transmission that honors the line behind it even as it extends the line forward.

Why the Blessings Were a Chain

Stack the three passages and the Targum's reading of the patriarchal blessings becomes legible. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan refuses to treat each blessing as a fresh event.

Abraham receives the original promise under the stars. Isaac blesses Jacob with the dew and fountains the same promise has been generating. Jacob blesses Joseph with the same vocabulary, in the same hydrological geometry, invoking the same Memra. The blessings, in the Targum's reading, are not multiple independent transactions. They are one ongoing transmission, with each patriarch handing the same gift forward in the same language he received it in.