The plain verse in (Genesis 11:7) says only, Come, let us go down. The plural has troubled readers since antiquity. To whom is God speaking?
Targum Pseudo-Jonathan answers without hesitation: the Holy One is addressing the seventy angels which stand before Him. The celestial court is already assembled. The sentence is not a royal plural; it is a convocation.
This is one of the signature moves of the Targum — the expansive Aramaic paraphrase composed in the land of Israel, which fills every gap in Scripture with the angelology of the later tradition. Seventy is not a stray number. In Jewish tradition the world will be divided into seventy nations, each assigned its own guardian angel. The Targumist is telling you that the committee that scatters Babel is the same committee that will later oversee the dispersion — the tongues and the territories are stitched together from the beginning.
What does it mean that God consults before descending? The Targum is preserving a deep rabbinic instinct: even the acts that look like pure power in the Hebrew Bible are, in the heavenly reading, acts of deliberation. The sky is not a monarchy of silence. It is a chamber of argument. Before humanity is scattered, heaven has a meeting.
There is tenderness in this. Judgment is not impulsive. The Holy One gathers His seventy before dividing ours. If the heavens deliberate before acting, the Targum seems to say, so should we.