510 texts in Midrash Aggadah
The Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Exodus 13:19) tells a story the Hebrew only hints at. Moses, on the night Israel leaves Egypt, is not packing or leading. He is recovering a body. Jo...
The Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Exodus 13:21) watches a miracle change its posture. By day the "glory of the Shekinah of the Lord" went before Israel in a column of cloud to lead th...
The Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Exodus 14:2) turns a navigational instruction into a theological ambush. God tells Israel to turn around and camp before the "Mouths of Hiratha"—gapi...
The Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Exodus 14:3) drops two shocking names into the Egyptian court. Pharaoh needs intelligence on the escaping Hebrews. Who gives it to him? Dathan and Ab...
The Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Exodus 14:7) notices a strange detail in the chariot count. Pharaoh assembles six hundred choice chariots, plus all the chariots of his servants. But...
The Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Exodus 14:9) pictures a scene the Hebrew leaves blank. While Pharaoh's chariots thunder toward them, what is Israel doing? The Targum says they are g...
The Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Exodus 14:10) splits the scene at the Sea of Reeds into two simultaneous acts of worship. Behind Israel, Pharaoh has arrived at the camp and sees the...
The Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Exodus 14:11) does not soften Israel's complaint. It sharpens it, and it names the complainers. They are not "the people." They are "the wicked gener...
The Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Exodus 14:12) remembers an earlier argument. "Was not this the word that we spake to thee in Mizraim?" The Hebrews had told Moses in Egypt, back when...
The Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Exodus 14:13) breaks Israel into four factions at the edge of the sea. Not "the people" united, but four parties, each with its own plan. The first s...
The Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Exodus 14:14) finishes the fourfold answer from the verse before. Two parties still need their reply: the fighters and the screamers. To the company ...
The Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Exodus 14:15) catches a surprising reprimand. Moses is standing on the shore praying. God interrupts him: "Why standest thou praying before Me?" It i...
The Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Exodus 14:19) watches a careful choreography. The Angel of the Lord, who had been leading Israel from the front, suddenly moves. He goes behind them....
The Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Exodus 14:20) describes the strangest cloud in the Torah. It comes between the camp of Israel and the camp of the Mizraee, and it has two sides simul...
The Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Exodus 14:21) loads Moses's staff with cosmic freight. This is not a shepherd's walking stick. It is the great and glorious rod which was created at ...
The Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Exodus 14:22) gives the sea-splitting a measurement. The Torah says the waters were "a wall on their right and on their left." The Targum specifies: ...
The Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Exodus 14:24) picks a very specific moment for the Egyptian catastrophe. It happened in the morning watch—and the Targum tells us why that hour matte...
The Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Exodus 14:25) gives the Mizraee a final moment of clarity. Their chariot wheels are broken—or in the Targum's alternate reading, made rough, gouged s...
The Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Exodus 14:27) adds a disturbing line to the drowning. Moses stretches his hand, the sea returns at morning, the Mizraee flee from the oncoming waves—...
The Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Exodus 14:28) closes the account of the Egyptian army with a single unforgiving sentence. "The waves of the sea returned, and covered the chariots, a...
The Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Exodus 14:30) adds two uncanny words to the aftermath. Israel, safe on the far shore, looks back and sees the Mizraee—dead and not dead—cast upon the...
The Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Exodus 14:31) records the moment Israel becomes a nation of faith. They have just watched the mightiest army in the world drown. Now they "feared bef...
The Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Exodus 15:2) turns a line from the Song at the Sea into a vision of impossible witnesses. "This is our God, who nourished us with honey from the rock...
The Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Exodus 15:3) softens a hard Hebrew line. The Torah reads "Adonai ish milchamah"—the Lord is a man of war. The phrase is startling. Is God really a "m...
When Israel stood dripping on the far shore of the Yam Suph, the Sea of Reeds, they sang of a hand. Not a sword, not an army, not even an angel. A hand. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan (an ...
Targum Pseudo-Jonathan does not translate the Song of the Sea so much as it paints it. Where the Hebrew speaks of majesty, the Targum speaks of walls. Where the Hebrew says fire, t...
The Hebrew of the Song of the Sea says the waters "piled up." Targum Pseudo-Jonathan gives us a different picture entirely, more vivid and more strange: For by the Word from before...
Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Exodus 15:9) lets us hear Pharaoh speak. Not in narration, not in summary. In his own voice, crowing on the far shore before the waters closed. The Targu...
The Song of the Sea reaches its highest note with a question: Who is like Thee among the exalted gods, O Lord, who is like Thee, glorious in holiness, fearful in praises, doing won...
Here Targum Pseudo-Jonathan gives us one of its boldest expansions. The Hebrew says only: Thou stretched out Thy right hand, the earth swallowed them. The Targum opens this single ...
Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Exodus 15:13) translates the end of the Song of the Sea not as a geographical promise but as a spiritual homecoming: Thou hast led in Thy mercy the peopl...
The Song of the Sea contains a strange prayer. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan renders it: Through the power of Thy mighty arm, let the terrors of death fall upon them, let them be silent a...
Targum Pseudo-Jonathan transforms the concluding verse of the Song of the Sea into a piece of cosmic architecture: Thou wilt bring them in, and plant them on the mountain of Thy sa...
(Exodus 15:18) in the Hebrew is a single line: The Lord shall reign forever and ever. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan expands it into a full coronation ceremony. When Israel beheld the sign...
The Hebrew text of (Exodus 15:19) only tells us that the horses of Pharaoh went into the sea and the waters returned. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan adds an almost Edenic detail that trans...
Targum Pseudo-Jonathan keeps one detail from the Hebrew and clarifies another. Miriam, the sister of Aaron, is called the prophetess. She takes a tambourine, and all the women come...
If Moses's song is a national anthem, Miriam's song, as Targum Pseudo-Jonathan renders it, is a moral theorem. She sang to the women: Let us give thanks and praise before the Lord,...
Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Exodus 15:22) slips in a phrase that seems geographical but is actually theological: they journeyed three days in the desert, empty of instruction, and f...
At Marah, where the water was too bitter to drink, Targum Pseudo-Jonathan tells us what the Hebrew only hints at. Moses prayed, and the Lord showed him the bitter tree of Ardiphne,...
Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Exodus 15:26) translates the covenant at Marah with a surgeon's precision. The Word of the Lord says: If you will truly hearken to the Word of the Lord y...
Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Exodus 15:27) reads the stopover at Elim as a map of Israel's constitution: And they came to Elim; and in Elim were twelve fountains of water, a fountain...
When the grumbling began in the wilderness of Sin, the Holy One responded not with rebuke but with a test. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Exodus 16:4) renders it: Behold, I will cause ...
Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Exodus 16:5) reads the Sabbath instructions for the manna as a halakhic footnote to the whole story: And on the sixth day they shall prepare what they se...
When the people grumbled for bread, Moses's reply, as Targum Pseudo-Jonathan renders it, is a lesson in chain-of-command theology: By this you shall know, when the Lord prepareth y...
Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Exodus 16:13) paints the arrival of the manna with a detail you will not find in the Hebrew: the dew was holy, and it was prepared as a table, round abou...
The word manna itself, as Targum Pseudo-Jonathan tells it, was born from a question. The sons of Israel looked at the fine frost on the desert floor and said to one another Man Hu?...
Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Exodus 16:20) names names. The Hebrew only tells us that "some of them" kept manna overnight against Moses's word. The Targum identifies the culprits: Bu...
Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Exodus 16:21) preserves a detail almost invisible in the Hebrew but rich in the Sages' imagination: when the sun grew hot, the uncollected manna did not ...
