Abimelech's second sentence to Isaac is sharper than his first. "Why hast thou done this to us? It might have been that the king, who is the principal of the people, had lain with thy wife, and thou wouldst have brought guilt upon us" (Genesis 26:10). The Targum Pseudo-Jonathan preserves the king's moral alarm almost intact.
Notice what Abimelech fears. He does not fear being embarrassed. He fears guilt — the communal stain of a sin committed without knowing.
Inadvertent sin in Jewish thought
The rabbis called this category shogeg — a transgression committed in ignorance. Torah takes it seriously. The korban chatat (sin offering) in Leviticus 4 is largely for inadvertent sins. Abimelech, though a gentile king, is operating on a moral intuition the Torah later codifies: a sin done without knowing is still a sin, and the community that harbored it bears the weight.
The Targum is making a quiet point. A Philistine king understood this. He understood that if his court had taken Rebekah as a concubine, the whole kingdom would have been implicated — even though they did not know she was married. Abimelech's ethical sensitivity makes Isaac's silence all the more costly.
The takeaway
We are responsible not just for what we do deliberately, but for the conditions we create. Isaac's half-truth could have drawn a whole city into spiritual peril. Pseudo-Jonathan holds up a gentile king as a mirror: sometimes the people outside the covenant see its moral implications more clearly than those inside.