The golden calf episode in (Exodus 32:1-35) is already one of the Torah's most dramatic stories. The Targum Jonathan makes it wilder, stranger, and more theologically loaded than anything in the Hebrew original.
The trouble starts with a detail the Bible never mentions. The people did not simply lose patience waiting for Moses. "Satana had come, and caused them to err, and perverted their hearts with pride." The Accuser himself descended to stir up the crowd, convincing them that Moses "may have been consumed in the mountain by the fire which flameth from before the Lord."
The women of Israel come out looking heroic. When Aaron asked for gold rings, "their wives denied themselves to give their ornaments to their husbands." The men tore out their own earrings instead. The calf was a male sin.
Aaron's motivation gets a backstory the Hebrew text omits entirely. He had seen Hur slain before him. Hur, grandson of Miriam, had tried to stop the people and was murdered. Aaron cooperated out of terror, not enthusiasm.
When Moses descended and saw the calf, the Targum says he saw "Satana among them dancing and leaping before the people." The holy writing on the tablets "flew, and was carried away into the air of the heavens" before the stone shattered. Even the letters refused to witness what came next.
The punishment was forensic. Moses ground the calf to powder, mixed it with water, and made the Israelites drink. "Whoever had given thereto any trinket of gold, the sign of it came forth upon his nostrils." The gold literally marked the guilty through their faces.
Aaron's defense is extraordinary. He claims he threw gold into the fire "and Satana entered into it, and there came out of it the similitude of this calf." The calf was not his creation. It was Satan's.
Moses then stood at the "sanhedrin (the supreme rabbinic court) gate of the camp" and issued the terrible command. Those who bore the golden mark in their nostrils fell that day: three thousand men.