Every Israelite Left Egypt With Five Children

Midrash Aggadah Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on Exodus 13:18 View source

Curated by The Jewish Mythology Team · Published January 13, 2025

The Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on Exodus 13:18 takes a quiet verse and fills it with multiplication. The Hebrew says simply that Israel went up from Egypt. The Targum adds: "every one of the sons of Israel, with five children, went up from the land of Mizraim."

Five children each. The detail is not decoration. It is the Targumist's way of answering a demographic puzzle: how did a family of seventy that came down with Jacob grow into a nation of six hundred thousand men? The answer is a fertility miracle. Egyptian enslavement, which was designed to crush the Hebrews, could not stop them from multiplying. Every Israelite man walked out of bondage with a crowd of children around his legs.

The Targum is reading Exodus 1:7 through this verse: "the children of Israel were fruitful, and increased abundantly, and multiplied, and waxed exceeding mighty." Pharaoh saw it and panicked. The Targumist sees it and celebrates. Where Pharaoh counted Hebrew babies and ordered them killed, God counted Hebrew babies and sent them out five to a family.

"The Lord led the people round by the way of the desert of the sea of Suph." The wandering nation in the wilderness, in the Targum's imagination, is a nation of children. The desert echoes with small voices.

Takeaway: the Targum reminds us that oppression often breeds the generation that outlasts it.

Themes

Parenting Community Miracles

Biblical References

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