The Torah in Genesis 25:17 gives us a short obituary for Ishmael: one hundred and thirty-seven years, and then he "expired and was gathered to his people." Targum Pseudo-Jonathan will not leave that obituary bare. It inserts three words that change everything: "he was converted in repentance."
The Aramaic is v'itachzar bi-tyuva — he returned in teshuvah. The Targum is refusing to end Ishmael's life with the rupture that began it. The boy who was sent away with Hagar into the wilderness, the archer who grew wild in Paran (Genesis 21:20-21), the brother whose hand the angel said would be against everyone — that man, in his last years, turned back toward the God of his father.
The Rabbis had reasons to read it this way. They noticed that the Torah says Ishmael "was gathered to his people," a phrase reserved in Genesis for the righteous. They noticed that Ishmael helped bury Abraham alongside Isaac (Genesis 25:9), and that in the ordering Isaac is named first — implying that Ishmael yielded precedence to his younger brother, which the sages took as a sign of his teshuvah (Bava Batra 16b).
The teaching is gentle. No one is outside the reach of return. Ishmael, who could have ended the story as a cautionary tale, ends it instead as proof that the door is never fully shut. His one hundred and thirty-seven years include everything — the expulsion, the wandering, the anger — and still leave room at the end for a different chapter.
That is what the tradition means by teshuvah. Not erasing the past. Finishing it well.