When the people cried out for water at Rephidim, Moses did not simply strike any rock. The Targum Pseudo-Jonathan insists on a precise geography: God said, "Behold, I will stand before thee there, on the spot where thou sawest the impress of the foot on Horeb" (Exodus 17:6). The rock was not chosen at random. It was marked.
The Aramaic reading teaches that when Moses had ascended Horeb to receive the burning-bush commission, he saw the imprint of a divine presence pressed into the stone. That place was bookmarked in his memory. Now, months later, with a mutinous nation ready to riot, God tells him to return to the exact spot. Strike that rock, and the water will answer.
There is a quiet theology here. Miracles do not happen everywhere; they happen where sanctity has already landed. Moses is not bullying nature into producing water. He is returning to a site where God had already declared His nearness, and the rock remembers.
So, the Targum concludes, "Moses did so before the elders of Israel", publicly, before witnesses, so that no one could later claim it was a trick. The takeaway: sometimes the way forward is to return to the place where you first met God, and to speak there again.