Targum Jonathan takes the story of <strong>Jacob's</strong> settlement in Egypt and layers it with theological details the Torah never mentions—including an economic revolution, a hidden act of kindness by Joseph, and one of the most powerful deathbed scenes in all of Jewish literature.
When Joseph brings his father before Pharaoh, the Torah simply says Jacob "blessed" the king. The Targum specifies exactly what he said: "May it please the Almighty that the waters of the Nile may be replenished, and may the famine pass away from the world in thy days." This was not a polite greeting. It was a prophetic prayer—and according to the tradition, it worked.
Pharaoh asks Jacob his age, and Jacob's answer in the Targum is more revealing than the biblical version. He says: "In my youth I fled before Esau my brother, and sojourned in a land not my own; and now in the time of my old age have I come down to sojourn here." He frames his entire 130 years as exile after exile, never truly at home.
The famine narrative gets a striking addition. When Joseph buys up all the land for Pharaoh, the Targum explains why he relocated entire populations, moving city dwellers to the provinces and province dwellers to cities: "for the sake of the brethren of Joseph, that they might not be called wanderers." Joseph reshuffled all of Egypt so his family would not stand out as foreigners. Everyone became a stranger simultaneously.
The Targum also reveals why Joseph spared the priests' land from seizure. It was not merely Pharaoh's decree. The Egyptian priests "had considered him innocent at the time when his master was seeking to put him to death, and they had delivered him from the judgment of death." They had saved Joseph's life during the Potiphar affair. He repaid the debt.
The Israelites in Goshen did not merely settle—they "built there schools and mansions, and inherited therein fields and vineyards, and they increased and multiplied greatly." The Targum pictures them establishing an entire educational infrastructure, not just surviving.
Jacob's deathbed request involves a detail the Torah leaves ambiguous. He asks Joseph to place his hand on "the place of my circumcision"—the sign of the covenant—when swearing the oath. But Joseph, "because he was his son, did not so put his hand." He swore the oath another way, out of respect.
The final moment is extraordinary. After Joseph swears, "immediately the Glory of the Shekhinah (the Divine Presence) of the Lord was revealed to him, and Israel worshipped upon the pillow of the bed." The divine Presence itself appeared in the room—drawn there by the oath to bury Jacob in the land of Canaan.