The splitting of the Red Sea is dramatic enough in the Hebrew Bible. The Targum Jonathan on (Exodus 14) turns it into something almost mythological, adding details about the Garden of Eden, a magical rod, and the Israelites dividing into four panicking factions on the shore.
The Targum reveals that when the Israelites camped by the sea, they were "gathering pearls and goodly stones, which the river Pishon had carried from the garden of Eden into the Gihon, and the Gihon had carried into the sea of Suph." Eden's treasures had been washing through the world's rivers and accumulating on this very beach. The Hebrew text says nothing about this.
When the Egyptians approached, the Targum says Israel split into four groups. One said to march into the sea. One said to return to Egypt. One said to fight. One said to scream and confuse the enemy. Moses addressed each faction separately with a different response. This four-faction tradition, absent from the biblical text, became one of the most famous midrash (rabbinic interpretive commentary)ic additions to the Exodus story.
The rod Moses held was no ordinary staff. The Targum says it was "the great and glorious rod which was created at the beginning," engraved with the Great Name of God, the ten plagues, the three patriarchs, the six matriarchs, and the twelve tribes. This rod was a primordial artifact, created before the world, carrying the entire history of Israel inscribed on its surface.
The sea split into twelve separate paths, one for each tribe. The waters congealed "like a wall, three hundred miles on their right hand and on their left." And God deliberately kept the Egyptians alive in the water long enough to experience their punishment fully, rather than letting them drown quickly. The Targum's God is not just powerful. He is precise.