Genesis 40 tells a straightforward story: two prisoners dream, Joseph interprets, one lives, one dies. The Targum Jonathan transforms this episode into a prophetic vision of Israel's entire future, packed with references to the patriarchs, the Egyptian slavery, and the ultimate redemption.
The Targum begins by explaining why Pharaoh's butler and baker were imprisoned in the first place. Genesis says only that they "offended" the king. The Aramaic adds that they "had taken counsel to throw the poison of death into his food and into his drink, to kill their master." This was not negligence or incompetence. It was an assassination conspiracy. The butler was later found innocent of the plot, while the baker was confirmed as a conspirator, which is why their fates diverged.
The most extraordinary addition comes in Joseph's interpretation of the butler's dream. Where Genesis has Joseph simply explain that the three vine branches mean three days, the Targum inserts an entire layer of prophetic symbolism. "The three branches are the three Fathers of the world: Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the children of whose sons are to be enslaved in Egypt in clay and brick work." The grapes being pressed into Pharaoh's cup become "the vial of wrath which Pharaoh himself is to drink at the last," a reference to the plagues and the Exodus. Joseph reads the butler's personal dream as a map of sacred history.
The Targum also makes Joseph's request for help more theologically charged. Where Genesis simply has Joseph ask the butler to mention him to Pharaoh, the Targum frames this as a spiritual failure: "Joseph, leaving his higher trust and retaining confidence in a man." The Aramaic translators saw Joseph's request not as a reasonable survival strategy but as a lapse of faith, trusting human help instead of divine providence.
The baker's dream gets parallel treatment. His three baskets are interpreted as "the three enslavements with which the house of Israel are to be enslaved." And the chapter's final verse delivers the moral judgment explicitly: "Because Joseph had withdrawn from the mercy that is above, and had put his confidence in the chief butler, he waited on the flesh. Therefore the chief butler did not remember Joseph, but forgot him, until from the Lord came the time of the end that he should be released." Joseph's two extra years in prison were not bad luck. They were divine correction for placing trust in a man rather than in God.