Of all the Targum's expansions, this one may be the darkest. Pseudo-Jonathan on Genesis 25:29 describes the day Esau sold his birthright for a bowl of lentils — and tells us exactly why he was exhausted when he arrived.
It was the day Abraham died. Jacob, the Targum says, was cooking a pot of lentils to serve as the traditional mourner's meal — round food, as the sages teach, because death rolls through the world in a circle (Bava Batra 16b). He was preparing to comfort his grieving father Isaac.
And Esau came in from the wilderness, exhausted — not from hunting, but because "in that day he had committed five transgressions." The Targum lists them one by one. He had worshipped with strange worship. He had shed innocent blood. He had gone in unto a betrothed woman. He had denied the life of the world to come. And he had despised the birthright.
Five sins in a single afternoon. Idolatry. Murder. Sexual violation. Heresy. And contempt for the covenant. The Targum is naming the five transgressions that later Jewish law will consider most severe — and packing them all into one day in Esau's life. This is not just a difficult man. This is a man who broke something foundational the day his grandfather was being buried.
Now picture the scene with the Targum's lens. Jacob is cooking lentils in mourning. Abraham is dead. And Esau walks in, still flushed from the worst day of his moral life, and demands food. The birthright he sells in the next verses is not carelessly lost. It is the final transgression in a day that was already a catalogue of ruin.
The Maggid's hardest teaching: some inheritances are not stolen from us. We spend them ourselves, in an afternoon, without noticing the price.