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The Passover Night Rebekah Chose and the Sinew Jacob Lost

Rebekah picks Passover night for Jacob's blessing. Decades later, an angel seizes Jacob's thigh and leaves a prohibition still honored.

Curated by Arthur · Told by Maggid ·
Table of Contents
  1. The Night Rebekah Knew
  2. What the Dew Meant
  3. The Angel's Grip and the Sinew That Was Taken
  4. The Prohibition That Persists

The Night Rebekah Knew

Rebekah had heard what Isaac said to Esau. She had heard the old man send his firstborn out to the field to hunt game and bring back a savory dish, and she had heard the promise that accompanied the instruction: eat, and my soul will bless you before I die. There was not much time. The blind father was alive and the birthright was about to be transferred to the son who had sold it for a bowl of lentils, unless someone moved quickly.

She moved quickly. But the Targum catches something in her urgency that the plain Hebrew does not express. Before she tells Jacob what to do, before she sends him to the flock and instructs him to bring two good kids, before any of the practical preparation begins, she tells him what night it is.

This night, she says, those on high are giving praise to the Lord of the world. The treasures of the dew are opened in it. On this night, the heavens are most attentive. The angels are singing. The moisture that sustains life is descending from the storehouses that stay closed through the rest of the year.

The Targum's reading is leyl shimurim, the night of watching, the same night on which, generations later, Israel will walk out of Egypt. It is Passover night. Rebekah did not choose the night of Jacob's blessing by accident. She read the liturgical calendar and placed her son in the room at the moment when heaven itself was open and inclined toward blessing.

What the Dew Meant

Isaac's blessing would include the dew of heaven. That much the plain text records. But the targumist reaches back to the moment before the blessing to show where that dew was coming from. The storehouses are open tonight. The blessing Isaac gives is not simply a patriarch's wish for his son's prosperity. It is a transfer of what heaven is already releasing, made to the son who is present in the room at the moment of maximum celestial generosity.

Esau will return from the field too late. By the time he arrives, the night of open storehouses will have passed, and the blessing he was sent to earn will have gone to the brother who was standing in its path when it descended.

The Angel's Grip and the Sinew That Was Taken

Decades pass between the blessing and the Jabbok. Jacob grows old in Haran, acquires a household, flees from Laban, and approaches the land of Canaan. On the night before he crosses the river to face his brother Esau again, something seizes him in the dark.

A man wrestles with him until dawn. The struggle goes on for hours, neither side able to prevail, until the stranger reaches out and touches the hollow of Jacob's thigh. The Targum is precise: the angel took hold of the hollow of his right thigh, at the place of the sinew that shrank. The contact was targeted. The angel did not strike randomly. He found the specific point that would leave a mark not only on Jacob's body but on the bodies of Jacob's descendants for every generation that followed.

Jacob limped across the Jabbok when the night was done. He had a new name. He had a wound that would not fully heal. And the hollow of his thigh was the evidence of what had happened between dark and dawn.

The Prohibition That Persists

The Targum on Genesis 32:33 preserves the origin of the prohibition against eating the gid ha-nasheh, the sciatic nerve. Therefore the sons of Israel do not eat the sinew which shrank, from cattle and from wild animals, until this day.

The practice is grounded in the injury. The angel who seized Jacob at the Jabbok took something from his body that Jacob's descendants agreed, generation after generation, to decline as food. The sinew that the angel touched belongs, by a kind of sympathetic law, to the story of that night. To eat it would be to consume the site of Jacob's wound, the part of the patriarch's body where the heavenly adversary had found his grip.

Jewish butchers have been removing it ever since. The practice connects every table set for a Jewish meal back to the dark struggle at the river crossing, to the man who fought all night and would not let go until he had been blessed, and to the part of his body that carries the memory of the cost he paid.

JacobPatriarchsTargum Pseudo JonathanRebekahSciatic NerveGid Hanasheh
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From the tradition

Sources

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The texts this telling draws on, in full. Open a card to read inline, or expand it for a wider, quieter read.

Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on Genesis 27:6Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on Genesis

The Targum Pseudo-Jonathan opens the scene of Rebekah's plan with a line the Hebrew does not speak. "Behold, this night those on high praise the Lord of the world, and the treasures of the dew are opened in it" (Genesis 27:6).

In Targum, this is leyl shimurim, the watchful night, the same night on which, generations later, Israel will leave Egypt. It is Pesach. The angels are singing. The dew of blessing is descending. And Rebekah knows exactly which son must stand in the room when Isaac opens his mouth to bless.

Why does the Targum place this on Passover?

The rabbis loved to knit the calendar together. In Pseudo-Jonathan's reading, the key nights of Jewish history converge on the same date. The night Jacob receives the blessing is the night Moses will lead the Exodus is the night the final redemption will come. One night carries them all.

The phrase the treasures of the dew are opened is evocative. In Jewish mysticism, dew (tal) is the image of resurrection and of quiet, abundant blessing. Every Pesach morning, in synagogues around the world, Jews add the prayer for dew, Tefillat Tal, to the Amidah. That prayer is rooted, in part, in the Targum's reading of this very night.

Why does this matter for Jacob?

Because the blessing Isaac is about to give is not an ordinary blessing. It is tied to the calendar of redemption itself. Rebekah, who heard the oracle in the womb, the elder shall serve the younger, understands that the door is open tonight and tonight only. She is not stealing a blessing. She is placing the right son under the right sky.

The takeaway: the Targum reminds us that holy timing matters. Some decisions can only be made on certain nights.

Full source
Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on Genesis 32:33Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on Genesis

"Therefore the sons of Israel do not eat the sinew which shrank." Targum Pseudo-Jonathan (Genesis 32:33) preserves the origin of one of the oldest kosher laws, the prohibition against eating the gid ha-nasheh, the sciatic nerve, from cattle and from wild animals "until this day."

The reason: the angel who wrestled Jacob touched and took hold of the hollow of his right thigh, at the place of the sinew that shrank. For thousands of years afterward, Jewish butchers have removed that sinew in memory of the wound.

Why remember a wound with a commandment?

The rabbis puzzled over this. Most commandments commemorate triumphs, the exodus, the giving of Torah, the dedication of the Temple. But this one commemorates an injury. Every Friday night, when a Jewish household sits down to a roast, the meat is missing a particular nerve because a patriarch limped across a river.

One answer: Jewish memory refuses to forget the cost of its own blessings. Israel did not become Israel in a moment of glory. It became Israel in a moment of pain. The missing nerve is a weekly reminder, in the most intimate of spaces, the dinner table, that the covenant was purchased with struggle.

The takeaway: the scars of the patriarchs live in your kitchen, woven into the laws of what you do and do not eat.

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Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on Genesis 27:9Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on Genesis

The Targum Pseudo-Jonathan does not let Rebekah's instruction pass as a simple culinary request. She tells Jacob, "Go now to the house of the flock, and take me from thence two fat kids of the goats; one for the pascha, and one for the oblation of the feast" (Genesis 27:9).

Two kids. One for the pascha, the Passover offering. One for the festival korban, the offering of the holiday that surrounds it. Rebekah, in Pseudo-Jonathan's telling, is running a full festival meal in miniature, centuries before the Exodus.

Anachronism or prophecy?

The first reading, it looks anachronistic. Passover does not yet exist. But the rabbis read the patriarchs as living Torah before it was given at Sinai. The Talmud in Yoma teaches that Abraham kept the commandments, including the rabbinic eruv tavshilin, even before they were spoken from the mountain. Pseudo-Jonathan is weaving Rebekah into that same tapestry.

The two kids also echo a detail from the later Torah: on certain holidays, two offerings are brought, one as a chatat (sin offering) and one as an olah (elevation offering). The dual structure of Jewish sacred time, sin lifted, celebration completed, is being enacted in Isaac's tent before it has a name.

The taste Isaac loved

The Targum also notes what the Hebrew implies: Isaac loved this taste. Whatever Rebekah did with those goats, the spices, the wine, the preparation, it was prepared with the memory of every meal she had made for her husband. Her maternal intuition becomes the instrument of prophecy.

The takeaway: holy endings use ordinary ingredients. The Pesach offering of the Exodus begins, in Pseudo-Jonathan's reading, in a grandmother's kitchen in Beersheba.

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