Exodus 26:28 describes an engineering detail. A middle bar, passing through the boards of the Tabernacle from end to end, holding the walls together. Plain Hebrew gives the specification and moves on. The Targum Pseudo-Jonathan cannot let it pass. Into this one verse it inserts one of the strangest and most beautiful legends in Targumic literature.
The tree Abraham planted at Be'er Sheva
The middle bar, the Targum says, came from the tree that Abraham planted in Be'er Sheva, the Well of the Seven, where he prayed in the name of the Word of the Lord (Genesis 21:33). That tamarisk stood as Abraham's living monument to the covenant, and it waited, unremarked, for centuries.
When Israel crossed the Sea of Reeds and the Egyptian army drowned behind them, the angels descended. They cut down Abraham's tree and cast it into the waters. The tree floated on the surface like a raft, visible to every Israelite still trembling on the far shore. An angel proclaimed aloud: This is the tree which Abraham planted in Beara of Sheba, and prayed there in the name of the Word of the Lord.
Why would God give the tree a voice at that moment?
Because Israel had just been born as a nation, and the Holy One wanted to show them that their rescue was not an accident. It was the covenant kept. The same tree that heard Abraham's prayer for a son was now witnessing the descendants of that son walk out of slavery on dry ground. The Targum binds Genesis to Exodus with a single piece of wood.
The sons of Israel gathered it from the sea and carried it into the wilderness. When the time came to build the Mishkan, they shaped it into the middle bar, seventy cubits long, passing through every board. The Targum adds a wonder: when the Tabernacle was reared, the bar coiled through the boards like a serpent, bending impossibly. When the Tabernacle was dismantled, it straightened back into a rod.
What does the middle bar teach?
The Mishkan was not a new beginning. It was the completion of something started by Abraham. The God who dwelt between the keruvim was the same God who had received Abraham's prayers under that tree. Every nail, every curtain, every offering rested on the seventy-cubit spine of Abraham's covenant.
The takeaway the old Maggid would press: nothing in a Jewish life is wasted. A tree planted in hospitality becomes, four centuries later, the beam that holds up the house of God.