When Moses and Aaron first confronted Pharaoh and demanded he release Israel, the Hebrew Bible records Pharaoh's defiant reply: "Who is the Lord, that I should obey his voice?" (Exodus 5:2). The Targum Jonathan turns this dismissal into something far more specific and strange.
In the Aramaic version, Pharaoh says: "The name of the Lord is not made known to me, that I should receive His word to release Israel. I have not found written in the Book of the Angels the name of the Lord." Pharaoh, in this telling, is not simply arrogant. He is a practitioner of angelic magic who literally consulted a divine registry—a catalog of supernatural beings—and could not find Israel's God listed among them. His refusal is not ignorance. It is the confidence of a sorcerer who believes he knows every power in the heavens and has determined that this particular deity is not among them.
This detail reveals how the ancient Aramaic translators understood Egyptian religion: as a sophisticated system of angelic invocation. Pharaoh's mistake was not that he doubted the supernatural. He was deeply embedded in it. His error was assuming that God could be cataloged alongside angels, filed in a book, and checked off a list.
The rest of the chapter follows the familiar narrative of escalating oppression—straw withheld, brick quotas unchanged, Israelite foremen beaten. But where Exodus says the foremen complained that Moses had "put a sword in their hand," the Targum frames the suffering differently: "Our affliction is manifest before the Lord, but our punishment is from you." The blame shifts. Moses and Aaron are not merely ineffective diplomats. They have actively caused harm—at least in the eyes of their own people. And Moses's anguished prayer to God at the chapter's end carries an even sharper edge: "From the hour that I went in unto Pharaoh to speak in Thy name, this people hath suffered evil."