The covenant at Moab in (Deuteronomy 29) is addressed to the Israelites standing there. Targum Jonathan expands the audience to infinity: "all the generations which have arisen from the days of old stand with us today before the Lord our God, and all the generations which are to arise unto the end of the world." Every Jewish soul that would ever exist—past, present, and future—was present at that moment. The Targum makes the Moab covenant as universal as the Sinai revelation.
The Targum offers a biting assessment of Israel's spiritual condition. God gave them "a heart not to forget, but to understand; eyes, not to blink, but to see; ears, not to be stopped, but to listen with." And then the verdict: "yet you have forgotten the law with your heart, and have blinked with your eyes, and have stopped your ears, unto the time of this day." The gifts were given. The people wasted them.
The forty years in the wilderness are described with domestic detail: "your garments have not become old upon your bodies, nor your shoes worn away from your feet." And the manna is characterized not as bread but as an educational program: "You have not eaten leavened bread, nor drunk wine new or old; and My law hath been diligently delivered in your schools." The wilderness was a seminary, not just a desert.
The warning about idolatry gets a psychological portrait. The sinner is one "whose heart may be turned away to wander" and who says: "I shall have peace, though I go on in the strength of the evil desires of my heart, so that he will add presumption to the sins of ignorance." The Targum distinguishes between accidental sins and deliberate rebellion. And it describes sin itself with a haunting metaphor: "the beginning of sin may be sweet, but its end is bitter as the deadly wormwood." The destruction of the land is compared to Sodom and Gomorrah, overthrown "by the Word of the Lord in His wrath." The chapter closes: "The secret things are manifest before the Lord our God, and He will take vengeance for them."