Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on Exodus 40:8 takes a simple instruction — set up the court around the tabernacle and hang a curtain at its gate — and turns it into one of the most striking images in all of Aramaic midrash.
The court belongs to the fathers
The meturgeman writes: thou shalt place the court round about, because of the merit of the fathers of the world, which encompasseth the people of the house of Israel round about. The "fathers of the world" are the patriarchs — Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Their merit is the fence. Everywhere Israel stands, the meturgeman teaches, there is already an invisible wall of zekhut avot, the merit of the fathers, holding the people in.
The court of the tabernacle was made of linen panels hung on wooden posts. Thin stuff, by any architectural standard. The meturgeman explains why it was enough. It was not the linen that held back the wilderness. It was the faithfulness of Abraham. It was the bound silence of Isaac on Moriah. It was Jacob's striving at the river Yabbok. Those lives, woven invisibly, were the true walls.
The gate belongs to the mothers
And the curtain at the entrance? Thou shalt set the hanging of the gate of the court on account of the merit of the mothers of the world, which spreadeth at the gate of Gehennam, that none may enter there of the souls of the children of the people of Israel.
The mothers are Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel, and Leah. Their merit, the meturgeman says, does something the fathers' merit does not. It stretches to the gate of Gehinnom itself and blocks it. The mothers stand in the doorway of the place of judgment and refuse to let their children's souls pass through.
This is a remarkable theological claim. The meturgeman is assigning the protection of the living to the fathers and the protection of the dead to the mothers. Men encircle the camp; women guard the afterlife. No soul of Israel slips into Gehinnom without the mothers standing in the way.
Why this reading matters
The architecture of the tabernacle, in the meturgeman's telling, is the architecture of the Jewish people itself. The patriarchs form the perimeter; the matriarchs hold the gate. The sanctuary is not just a building. It is a map of ancestral love still working on behalf of every generation after.
The takeaway: the court of the tabernacle is thin linen, but it is held up by lives that ended long before the first tent peg was driven into the sand.