Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 12:11) offers one of the most quietly astonishing readings in the entire Aramaic paraphrase tradition. It explains how Abram can suddenly, after years of marriage, say to Sarah, Now I know that thou art a woman of fair aspect.
The Targumist proposes a reason as startling as it is tender. Abram and Sarah have arrived at the Nile on their descent into Egypt during a famine. They must wade across. Sarah lifts the hem of her robe to pass through the water, and for the first time in their marriage Abram sees his wife's body in the light. Behold, until this I have not beheld thy flesh.
This is a startling window into the modesty of the patriarchal household as the Targumist imagines it. For decades Abram and Sarah have shared a tent, a mission, a caravan of souls — and, according to this ancient reading, Abram has until this river moment never fully looked at his wife. The river forces a disclosure.
And Abram's reaction is not appetite. It is alarm. Now I know thou art a woman of fair aspect — and he understands immediately what that beauty will mean in Pharaoh's Egypt. The Targumist turns a potentially uncomfortable verse into a story about a husband suddenly seeing, in a flash of involuntary light, the danger his wife is in.
The lesson is delicate. Sometimes the people we have lived beside for years reveal themselves only in crossings — the river, the border, the hard passage. And sometimes love is simply the decision to keep walking together after that revelation, not away from it.