The Hebrew Bible mentions a cloud over the Tabernacle. The Targum Jonathan turns it into a sentient navigation system—a pillar of divine fire and glory that dictated every movement of an entire nation for forty years.
The chapter opens with the second Passover, performed in the wilderness of Sinai on the fourteenth of Nisan. But certain men were ritually impure from contact with a corpse. They came to Moses, distraught that they could not offer the Passover sacrifice. What follows is one of the Targum's most remarkable editorial insertions.
"This is one of four matters of judgment brought before Moses the prophet, which he decided according to the Word of the Holy One." The Targum explains that in some cases Moses was deliberate—those involving life—and in others prompt—those involving money. He said "I have not heard" deliberately, to teach future leaders of the Sanhedrin (the supreme rabbinic court) "to be deliberate in judgments regarding life, but prompt in judgments about money, and not to be ashamed to ask counsel in things too hard for them, inasmuch as Moses himself, the Rabbi of Israel, had need to say, I have not yet heard."
God then authorized a second Passover in the month of Iyar for those who were impure or "at a distance from the threshold of his house." The Targum adds that someone impure in Nisan "may eat unleavened bread, but not perform the oblation of the Passover."
The chapter's second half describes the Cloud of Glory. By day it covered the Tabernacle. By night it appeared "like a vision of Fire." When it lifted, Israel marched. When it settled, they camped. Whether it rested for two days, a month, or an entire year, the people waited. Every movement was "by the mouth of the Word of the Lord." The Targum envisions a nation of 600,000 people with zero autonomy over their own travel, entirely governed by a luminous cloud.