The Torah drops a cryptic detail in the middle of an Edomite genealogy: this is Anah who found the yemim in the wilderness. For two thousand years, readers have argued about what yemim means. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 36:24) gives a bold answer.
Anah, while tending his father Sebeon's donkeys, crossbred onagers — wild desert asses — with domestic she-asses. After some time, he noticed that their offspring were something new. They were mules: stronger than donkeys, steadier than horses, and sterile, a species that could exist but could not reproduce itself.
The Targumist is not just solving a lexical puzzle. He is telling us that Anah was the first human being to tamper with the boundaries God had drawn between species. The Torah forbids kilayim — mixed breeding of animals, seeds, and fabrics (Leviticus 19:19). The sages saw in Anah's invention the first violation of this principle, and they saw the mule's sterility as the evidence. God had set borders between kinds, and when a mortal crossed them, the result could live but not continue. A single generation. No future.
The mule became useful. Kings rode mules. Solomon was crowned on a mule (1 Kings 1:33). But the mule also carries a quiet warning written into its very body: what is made by crossing what God separated cannot birth what comes next. Anah's discovery was clever. It was not creation. Only God creates lineages that multiply.