686 texts in Midrash Aggadah
Before the world had shape, it had nothing. No animals. No people. Not even a horizon. The Aramaic of Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 1:2) calls it tohu va-vohu, rendered as "va...
When the Torah says simply "and God called the light Day, and the darkness He called Night," Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 1:5) pauses to explain why. Naming, in the Targum, i...
The Torah says God "made the firmament." Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 1:7) gives us a sculptor's hand. The Lord, the Aramaic says, made the expanse upbearing it with three fi...
On the third day, God speaks and the oceans obey. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 1:9) specifies what the Torah leaves vague: it is the lower waters — the ones that remain benea...
The third day finishes with a command that sounds almost agricultural. In Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 1:11), the Lord tells the earth to "increase the grassy herb whose seed...
The Torah tells us the sun, moon, and stars are for "signs and seasons, days and years." Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 1:14) lets this sentence breathe. The luminaries, in the...
This is one of the strangest moments in Targum Pseudo-Jonathan's creation story — and one of its most famous. The Torah simply says God made "two great lights." The Targum on (Gene...
Before the world has a single footstep of land-dwelling life, the fifth day brings a first wave of motion. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 1:20) asks the lakes of the waters to ...
Here the Targumist drops a myth into the middle of the verse. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 1:21) says the Lord created the great tanninim — sea dragons — and among them Levia...
On the sixth day, the earth gets its turn. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 1:24) echoes the pattern already set in the sea: every living creature comes forth "the kind that is c...
The Torah ends the sixth day's first act with a simple line: God saw that it was good. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 1:25) repeats the clean/unclean doubling — beast of the ea...
The strangest word in the Torah's creation account is "us." "Let us make man in our image." The rabbis have spilled rivers of ink explaining who God was talking to. Targum Pseudo-J...
The Torah simply says God created Adam "male and female He created them." Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 1:27) hands us an anatomy textbook. The Lord created Adam "with two hun...
Before any commandment and before any punishment, humanity's first word from God is a blessing. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 1:28) tells us Adam and his wife were blessed and...
The Torah's provision for humanity is stated briefly: "every herb yielding seed, every tree yielding fruit, to you it shall be for food." Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 1:29) e...
Humans get fruit and vegetables. Animals get green leaves. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 1:30) preserves the original vegetarian economy of Eden — "to every beast of the earth...
The Torah says simply that God finished His work by the seventh day. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 2:2) smuggles in one of Judaism's most famous traditions: "the ten formation...
The Torah says God blessed the seventh day and sanctified it. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 2:3) lets the sentence expand: the Lord blessed the seventh day more than all the d...
Before there was rain, before there was agriculture, there was a waiting earth. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 2:5) explains the pause: "all the trees of the field were not as ...
The Torah's "a mist went up from the earth" becomes, in Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 2:6), something far grander. "A cloud of glory descended from the throne of glory, and wa...
The Torah says God formed man from the dust of the earth. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 2:7) takes this one sentence and turns it into a cosmic geography. "The Lord God create...
The Torah says God planted a garden in Eden. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 2:8) goes further. The garden "was planted by the Word of the Lord God before the creation of the wo...
The Torah names two trees in the garden. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 2:9) tells us the dimensions of one of them. The Tree of Life, the Targumist says, stood "in the midst o...
The Torah says God placed the man in the garden "to work it and to guard it." Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 2:15) tells us where Adam came from and what the work really was. G...
The entire moral architecture of the Torah fits into one verse. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 2:17) renders it sharply: "of the tree of whose fruit they who eat become wise to...
Naming is an act of authority. In Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 2:19), the Lord creates every beast of the field and every fowl of the heavens and brings them to Adam "to see ...
The naming finished. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 2:20) closes the scene with a quiet loneliness: "Adam called the names of all cattle, and all fowl of the heavens, and all b...
The Torah says God took "one of his ribs" to make the woman. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 2:21) gets oddly specific. "He took one of his ribs, it was the thirteenth rib of th...
Adam wakes up and speaks. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 2:23) gives him a line with an unusual opening: "This time, and not again, is woman created from man." The Targumist is...
The Torah's famous line — "therefore a man leaves his father and mother and cleaves to his wife" — gets a pointed rewording in Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 2:24). A man "shal...
The serpent's opening move is not "you will not die." Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 3:4) sharpens the attack. "In that hour the serpent spake accusation against his Creator, a...
The Torah says Eve saw the tree was good for food. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 3:6) tells us she also saw something else. "The woman beheld Samael, the angel of death, and w...
The Torah says their eyes were opened and they knew they were naked. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 3:7) adds a detail that changes the image entirely. They realized "they were...
Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 3:8) uses a phrase it will return to again and again: "the Word of the Lord God" — the Memra, the divine speech as a presence in its own right. A...
The Torah's "Where are you?" is one of the shortest questions in Scripture. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 3:9) unfolds it. God calls to Adam and says, in the Targum's longer r...
Adam's answer, in the Torah, is evasive: "I was afraid because I was naked." Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 3:10) lets him say more. "The voice of Thy Word heard I in the garde...
God turns to the woman, and Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 3:13) lets Eve expand on the Hebrew's terse "the serpent beguiled me." In the Targum she says, "The serpent beguiled ...
Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 3:14) tells us the original serpent was not a crawling thing. God "brought the three unto judgment" — Adam, Eve, and the serpent — and pronounced...
The Torah says God will put enmity between the serpent and the woman's seed. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 3:15) turns that enmity into a long, conditional war with an ending....
Eve's sentence in the Torah is brief. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 3:16) weighs it. "Multiplying, I will multiply thy affliction by the blood of thy virginity, and by thy con...
Adam's sentence, in Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 3:17), includes an unusual charge. "Accursed is the ground, in that it did not show thee thy guilt; in labour shalt thou eat ...
The curse of thorns and thistles arrives, and for the first time in the story, Adam argues back. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 3:18) has Adam pray: "I pray, through mercies fr...
The Torah says simply, "to dust thou shalt return." Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 3:19) refuses to let that be the end. After the dust, the Targumist says, there is one more a...
The Torah says God made "garments of skin" for Adam and his wife. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 3:21) tells us whose skin. "The Lord God made to Adam and to his wife vestures ...
Just as God consulted the angels to make humanity, He consults them again to remove humanity from paradise. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 3:22) records the divine deliberation...
Adam's expulsion becomes, in Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 3:24), a sweeping theological statement about everything God made before He made anything. God drove the man out fro...
The Torah simply says Cain brought an offering "in the course of time." Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 4:3) fixes a date: the fourteenth of Nisan. That is the eve of Passover. ...
In Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 4:4), Abel's offering is described in three careful words: "the firstlings of the flock, and of their fat." The firstlings — the first-born of...
