Why Pseudo-Jonathan Called the Drying Wind a Wind of Mercies

Most readers picture the flood as a single weather event with a beginning and an end. Rain came. Rain stopped. Noah disembarked. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on Genesis, the expansive Aramaic Targum preserving older traditions in a later redacted form, treats the same storm as a legal proceeding with four distinct phases.

In the Targum, the flood opens with a precise indictment, executes by a precise instrument, ends by a named act of mercy, and closes with a recorded covenant. The Aramaic translator handles each phase with attention to the kind of detail a court clerk would notice. Four passages, read together, show the case file.

The Rapine That Brought the End

Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on Genesis 6:13 opens with the verdict. The end of all flesh cometh before Me, because the earth is filled with rapine by their evil works.

The Hebrew word the Torah uses is chamas, often translated as violence. The Targum specifies it as rapine, the Aramaic term for predatory theft, the kind of taking that strips a victim of their dignity along with their property. The Targum is not being more colorful than the Hebrew. It is being more legal. Chamas, in rabbinic readings of the verse, is the technical category of organized robbery that has corrupted the social fabric beyond repair.

The verdict that follows is therefore proportionate. I will destroy them with the earth. The world that had been built to host human life is going to be unbuilt because human life had built itself around taking what did not belong to it.

The Flood That Was Built to Swallow

Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on Genesis 6:17 names the instrument. I, behold, I bring a flood of waters upon the earth to swallow up all flesh.

The Aramaic verb for swallow, gevasa, is more aggressive than the Hebrew. The flood, in the Targum's hearing, is not a passive rise of water. It is an active intake. The waters, like a great mouth, are going to consume everything that hath in it the spirit of life. The verse closes with the totalizing phrase. Whatever is upon the earth shall be swept away.

The Targum has converted a natural disaster vocabulary into the vocabulary of an instrument of judgment. Water that swallows is not water that floods. It is water that has been given a job to do, the way the angels in the Targum are given jobs to do. The flood was not weather. It was procedure.

The Wind of Mercies That Reversed It

And then, at the turning point of the story, the Targum introduces the phrase that has stopped readers in their tracks for two millennia. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on Genesis 8:1 reads the Lord caused the wind of mercies to pass over the earth, and the waters were dried.

The Hebrew verse says simply God made a wind to pass over the earth. The Aramaic specifies the wind's nature. Ruach rachamin, the wind of mercies. The wind that dried the flood was not a meteorological reversal. It was a moral one. The same Holy One who had sent the swallowing water now sent the wind whose category was forgiveness.

The midrash is doing something quiet and astonishing. The very breath that recedes the waters carries within it the divine attribute the Holy One had suspended during the judgment. Justice swept the earth. Mercy dried it. The two attributes are co-authoring the rescue.

The Targum's translator wants the reader to understand that the drying of the floodwaters was not the end of a punishment. It was the return of a deliberately withheld kindness.

The Covenant That Closed the Case

Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on Genesis 9:11 closes the case file. I will establish my covenant with you, and will not again cause all flesh to perish by the waters of a flood; and there shall not again be a flood to destroy the earth.

The Aramaic preserves the doubling. The first clause says the Holy One will not cause all flesh to perish. The second clause says there will not be a flood to destroy the earth. Two slightly different statements of the same promise. The Targum reads them as two separate legal undertakings. The Holy One promises not to repeat the agency. The world is granted, separately, not to host the instrument.

Heaven, in the Targum's hearing, signs both sides of the contract. The destroyer will not destroy. The destroyable will not be destroyed. The rainbow that will shortly appear in the sky is the visual record of a doubled commitment.

Why the Wind Was the Center

Stack the four passages and the structure of the Targum's flood narrative comes into focus. The indictment was precise. The instrument was active. The covenant was doubled. And in the middle of the story, the Targum inserted the phrase that holds the whole arc together. Ruach rachamin.

The flood was not, in the Aramaic, a story of divine retribution with a happy ending. It was a story of a Holy One who carries both justice and mercy at once, withholds the second during the executions of the first, and reintroduces the second precisely when the reader has begun to doubt it was still on the table.

The wind of mercies was not weather. It was the Holy One breathing back into the world the attribute He had been holding behind His back.