When the Tabernacle needed building, the Torah says donations poured in from everyone whose heart moved him (Exodus 35:21). Targum Pseudo-Jonathan adds a remarkable detail: these givers were not merely generous. They were filled with the Spirit of prophecy.
The Targum's phrase reframes the entire offering. It was not a normal fundraising drive. Every Israelite who rose up to bring gold, silver, hyacinth, crimson, or fine linen did so because the ruach ha-kodesh — the Holy Spirit — had moved through them. Giving, in the Targum's reading, is a prophetic act.
This is a startling theology of charity. Normally we think of prophecy as speech — Moses prophesies, Isaiah prophesies, Jeremiah prophesies. They say things. But the Targum identifies a silent form of prophecy: the instinct, rising unprompted in the chest, to bring what one has and lay it before the Lord. The rabbis later called this nedavah, a free-will offering, and treated it as the highest form of service, because no one commanded it.
The Targum's vision democratizes prophecy. You do not need to be Moses or Aaron. A woman with a gold bracelet on her wrist, a man with a goat's hair in his tent, a child with a scrap of purple dye — each of them, in the moment they chose to give, entered the ranks of the prophets.
The takeaway: the urge to give is not a human calculation. In Jewish thought, it is God speaking through the giver's own pulse. When generosity rises in you unbidden, the tradition calls that voice by its true name: the Spirit of prophecy.