When Jacob sent Joseph to check on his brothers in Shechem, the Torah gives no reason for the trip other than routine concern. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 37:13) reveals a father's actual terror.
Jacob says: I am afraid lest the Hivites come and smite them, because they smote Hamor and Shekem and the inhabitants of the city. This is the story of Dinah. Years earlier, after Shechem the son of Hamor violated Dinah, Simeon and Levi had entered the city with swords and killed every male (Genesis 34). The massacre had made Jacob's family a name to curse in the Canaanite hills. Every surviving Hivite clan had a reason to want the sons of Jacob dead.
And now those same sons — the brothers who had swung those swords — were grazing flocks right where it happened. Jacob is not being paranoid. He is being a father. He knows what his sons did. He knows who remembers. And he cannot sit in his tent in Hebron without seeing their funeral.
The irony is brutal. Jacob sends Joseph to protect his brothers from a Hivite attack that never comes. The danger in Shechem that day is not the neighbors. It is the brothers themselves. Joseph rides out to save his brothers from strangers and ends up sold by his brothers to strangers.
The Targumist is showing us that parents rarely fear the right thing. Jacob watched the wrong horizon. The true threat was already sleeping in his own tents.