The mercy arrives as quickly as the warning. The Holy One says to Moses: Return thy hand into thy bosom — Aitaph in the Aramaic — and when Moses withdraws it, it had become clean as his flesh. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan lingers on the reversal because it matters more than the affliction itself.
Why perform the sign of leprosy at all if it is just going to be undone? The sages of the Targumic tradition answer: because this is precisely the shape of teshuvah — repentance. The hand that slandered can be cleansed. The leader who doubted his people can be restored. Nothing in the Jewish imagination is more central than the possibility of return.
The Shape of Every Sin That Can Be Healed
The verse uses the word clean deliberately. Leviticus 13 uses the same root, tahor, when describing the ritual restoration of a leper. The Targum is showing Moses — and through him, every future prophet — the full arc: affliction, then purification, then restoration to the community.
The takeaway: God does not merely warn Moses by making his hand white as snow. He also demonstrates, in a single breath, that the warning is not a verdict. The same bosom that held the affliction holds the cure. The prophet who will one day beg God to forgive a nation that built a golden calf learns here, with his own flesh, that forgiveness is built into the structure of the world.