The first-fruits ceremony in (Deuteronomy 26) is beautiful in the Torah. Targum Jonathan makes it lavish. Where the Hebrew says simply to bring produce in a basket, the Targum adds: "you shall put crowns upon the baskets, hampers, and paper cases." The first-fruits arrive at the Temple decorated like royalty. The priest does not merely accept the offering—he must "receive, take, bring, uplift, and lower it, and afterward lay it down before the altar." Five distinct ritual motions for a single basket of figs.
The famous declaration "a wandering Aramean was my father" undergoes a radical reinterpretation. Instead of describing Jacob as a wandering Aramean, the Targum says: "Our father Jakob went down into Aram Naharia at the beginning, and Laban sought to destroy him; but the Word of the Lord saved him out of his hands." The Aramean is not Jacob—it is Laban, and he is not wandering but attempting murder. This completely reverses the subject of the sentence, following the rabbinic reading preserved in the Passover Haggadah (non-legal rabbinic narrative).
The tithing confession becomes more elaborate. The Israelite must account for three separate tithes: "the first tenth to the Levites, the second tenth, which is the tythe of the poor, to the stranger, the orphan, and widow," and a third tenth to "bring up and eat before the Lord thy God." The confession includes: "I have not eaten of it in the days of my mourning, nor separated from it for the unclean, neither have I given of it a covering for the soul of the dead." That last phrase—using tithe money for burial shrouds—is the Targum's specification of an otherwise cryptic Hebrew phrase.
The chapter closes with the Shema woven into the covenant declaration: "Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God is one Lord." The Targum calls this "one confession in the world"—the singular declaration that binds God to Israel and Israel to God, a mutual acknowledgment ratified on this day.