The verse is brief and the Targum does not soften it. Judah turned aside to the veiled woman at the crossroads and said, Let me now go in with thee, for he knew not that she was his daughter-in-law (Genesis 38:16). Then she asked the practical question: What wilt thou give me?
Pseudo-Jonathan refuses to let Judah off the hook and refuses to condemn him completely. The Targum's phrase — he knew not — is already a partial defense; he was not knowingly pursuing Tamar. But the tradition is also honest about the moment. A man who leads one of the great tribes of Israel paused on a public road and bargained with a stranger. The Aramaic preserves Tamar's cool transactional voice: she does not beg, she negotiates.
The Sages read her question — What wilt thou give me? — as the sharpest line in the chapter. She is not asking for payment. She is asking Judah to hand over, freely, the tokens of his identity. The seal, the cord, the staff are the badges of a man's public self. By asking for them she is setting up the moment, months later, when the whole tribe will see them held aloft in a court (Genesis 38:25) and Judah will have to decide whether his pride is worth a woman's life.
The Targum wants us to notice that the story's hinge is already present here. Judah, in his ignorance, is giving up the pieces of himself he will need to reclaim through public repentance. Tamar is gathering them up.
What we learn on this short road is that the objects we hand over casually can return to us as witnesses. The private moment will become a public reckoning, and the question What wilt thou give me? is still being asked of us, at every crossroads.