The Torah's promise of return from exile in (Deuteronomy 30) is hopeful. Targum Jonathan makes it messianic. Where the Hebrew says God will gather the scattered, the Targum says: "from thence will the Word of the Lord gather you together by the hand of Elijah the great priest, and from thence will He bring you by the hand of the King Meshiha." Two figures—Elijah and the Messiah—are named as the agents of the final ingathering. Neither appears in the Torah's text. The Targum inserts them as if they were always meant to be there.
Repentance itself gets a physical destination. The prayers of the righteous "shall come up unto the glorious throne of the Lord your God." Repentance is not an abstract emotional state—it travels upward and arrives at a specific location in heaven. And God does not merely accept it; "His Word will accept your repentance with favour."
The circumcision of the heart receives a cosmic rewrite. The Torah says God will circumcise your heart. The Targum says: "He will take away the foolishness of your heart, and of your children's heart; for He will abolish evil desire from the world, and create good desire." This is not individual transformation. This is the elimination of the yetzer hara (יצר הרע), the evil inclination, from all of creation. God will fundamentally redesign human nature.
The famous passage about the Torah being "not in heaven" gets grounded in daily practice. "The word is nigh you, in your schools; open your mouth, that you may meditate on it; purify your hearts, that you may perform it." The Targum places Torah study in the beit midrash, the study hall, not in some mystical location. And the choice between life and death becomes explicitly about two worlds: "Choose therefore the way of life, even the law, that you and your children may live the life of the world to come." The stakes are not just survival in this world but existence in the next.