The Targum Jonathan on (Deuteronomy 3) contains two stunning additions to the biblical narrative. The first involves a giant king. The second involves the most desperate prayer Moses ever prayed—and why God refused to hear it.
Og, king of Bashan, was the last survivor of the giants who perished in the Flood. The Hebrew text mentions his iron bed, nine cubits long and four cubits wide. The Targum specifies that these measurements use "the cubit of his own stature"—meaning the bed was measured by Og's own enormous forearm. If a normal cubit is about 18 inches, Og's cubit would have been far larger. The bed was kept "in the archive-house in Rabbath" of the Ammonites, preserved as evidence that such beings once walked the earth.
The Targum also identifies Mount Hermon by two names. The Sidonians called it "the fruit-producing Mount," while the Amorites called it "the Snowy Mountain, because the snow never ceases from it either in summer or winter." This ethnographic detail appears nowhere in the standard Hebrew—the Aramaic translators were interested in how different peoples understood the same landscape.
But the chapter's emotional center is Moses' prayer to enter the Promised Land. The Targum expands his plea dramatically. Moses begs: "I supplicate compassion before Thee, O Lord God: Thou hast begun to show unto Thy servant Thy greatness." He asks specifically to see "the good land beyond Jordan, that goodly mountain on which is builded the city of Jerusalem, and Mount Lebanon, where the Shekinah (the Divine Presence) will dwell." The Hebrew says "that goodly hill country and Lebanon." The Targum reveals what Moses really wanted—to see the Temple Mount and the place where God's presence would rest.
God's response is devastating in its finality: "Let it be enough for thee; speak not before Me again of this matter." The Targum adds that Israel then "dwelt in the valley, weeping for our sins, because we had been joined with the worshippers of the idol of Peor." Moses' exile was inseparable from Israel's failures.