A man gathered wood on the Sabbath and was executed for it. The Hebrew Bible tells this story in three verses. The Targum Jonathan expands it into a legal precedent about judicial humility, identifies the man's tribe, and adds the detail that he physically attacked the witnesses.
The bulk of Numbers 15 covers offerings and libations for when Israel enters the Promised Land. The Targum's additions here are precise: it specifies that the bread separation offering was "one cake of twenty-four" from the first of the dough, and clarifies that the obligation applied to wheat bread, "not rice, nor millet, nor pulse." These dietary specifics reflect later rabbinic debates projected back into the wilderness.
The chapter's dramatic center is the wood-gatherer. The Targum says: "The decree of the Sabbath was known to them, but the punishment for the profanation of the Sabbath was not known." A man "of the house of Joseph" deliberately went out to gather wood, saying to himself, "I will go and pull up wood on the Sabbath day." The Targum adds that "he wounded the witnesses who had found him pulling up wood"—making him not just a Sabbath violator but a violent one.
Then comes the Targum's signature legal teaching. "This is one of four judgments which were brought before Moses the prophet." In cases involving money, Moses ruled quickly. In cases involving life, he deliberated. And in each case he said "I have not heard," deliberately, to teach future judges of the Sanhedrin (the supreme rabbinic court) not to be ashamed to seek counsel. Even Moses, "the Rabbi of Israel," needed to say those words.
The chapter closes with the commandment of tzitzit (fringes). The Targum specifies they must be "not of threads, nor of yarns, nor of fibres" but made in a particular manner with five ligatures and an embroidery of hyacinth. Their purpose: "that you may remember and perform all My precepts, and be holy, like the angels who minister before the Lord your God."