After Aaron died, the protective Cloud of Glory vanished. Amalek, who had disguised himself by taking the throne of Arad, saw his opportunity. The Targum's version of (Numbers 21) reveals that Israel had been wandering back and forth for forty years across six encampments between Rekem and Motseroth, finally returning "by the way of the explorers to the place where they had rebelled against the Lord of the world." Their route was not random—it was a decades-long circle back to the scene of their original failure.
When the people complained about the manna, the Targum inserts an extraordinary speech that has no parallel in the Torah. A bat kol—a heavenly voice—fell from heaven and declared: "Come, all men, and see all the benefits which I have done to the people whom I brought up free out of Mizraim. I made manna come down for them from heaven, yet now they murmur against Me. Yet behold, the serpent, whom in the days of the beginning of the world I doomed to have dust for his food, has not murmured against Me." God compared Israel unfavorably to snakes. The creatures cursed to eat dust in Eden never complained—so God sent those very serpents, the ones who never protested their food, to bite the people who would not stop protesting theirs.
The bronze serpent's healing power came with a condition the Torah does not state. Gazing at it only worked "if his heart was directed to the Name of the Word of the Lord." The object itself had no power. It was a test of spiritual focus.
The Targum's retelling of the defeat of Og king of Bashan is wildly vivid. When Moses saw Og, he trembled in fear—until he remembered that this was the same Og who had once taunted Abraham and Sarah, calling them "trees that bear no fruit." God had kept Og alive through the generations specifically so he could witness Abraham's descendants multiply, then be destroyed by them. Og tore up a mountain six miles wide and hoisted it onto his head to hurl at the Israelite camp. But God sent a reptile that ate through the mountain, trapping Og's head inside it. His teeth locked in both directions. Moses took an axe ten cubits long, leaped ten cubits into the air, and struck Og on the ankle—and the giant fell dead.