The Targum Pseudo-Jonathan offers a theological explanation for why Esau arrived late and empty-handed. "The Word of the Lord had impeded him from taking clean venison; but he had found a certain dog, and killed him, and made food of him, and brought to his father" (Genesis 27:31).
A dog. Not a clean animal. Not a kosher animal. The Targum is saying that Esau's meal was, by the standards of later Torah law, ritually forbidden. The contrast with Jacob's two kosher kids could not be sharper.
The Memra stops the hunt
Pseudo-Jonathan's phrase — the Word of the Lord had impeded him — is quietly astonishing. It means Esau was not merely slow. He was actively blocked. Every deer he approached disappeared. Every trap came up empty. The Memra itself, the active Divine Word, was clearing the field so that Rebekah's plan could finish first.
This reading reframes the whole moral architecture of the episode. The rabbis were uncomfortable with the idea that Jacob's blessing was stolen. By adding this line, Pseudo-Jonathan shifts the weight: Heaven itself participated. Rebekah's stratagem succeeded not because she was cleverer than Isaac but because the Divine Will held Esau's bow back.
A dog for a blessing
The rabbis never forgot the symbolism. Jacob brought the Pesach offering. Esau brought a dog. One son lived by the clean and the sanctified. The other settled, at the last minute, for whatever his hands could grasp. In the Targum's reading, this was not chance. It was a test — and it revealed what Esau had always been.
The takeaway: what you bring to the altar at the last minute shows what you value. Pseudo-Jonathan's Esau brings a dog, and receives exactly the blessing that remains.