The Hebrew of (Genesis 12:5) uses a strange phrase: the souls they had made in Haran. How does one make a soul?
Targum Pseudo-Jonathan answers in a single word that opens a whole theology. The Aramaic renders it: the souls whom they had proselyted in Haran. Abram and Sarah did not collect servants — they collected seekers. They walked out of Haran with a caravan of converts.
The Sages in Bereshit Rabbah 39:14 imagine the scene: Abram brought the men under the wings of the Divine Presence and Sarah brought the women. The plural souls they made is read as the human beings they remade — persons whose inner lives they rewrote by teaching them that the world has one Author.
This is the first mission in Jewish history, and the Targumist wants you to feel how strange it was. Before there was a Temple, before there was a Torah at Sinai, before there was even a promised land, there was a tent in Mesopotamia with a husband and wife teaching strangers about the one God. The covenant begins as a classroom. The journey to Canaan is also the journey of the first students.
And notice who they bring. All the substance which they had acquired, and then the souls. The Targum lists the livestock and the disciples in the same breath — not to equate them, but to remind you that Abram packed everything he loved. Possessions. People. Pupils. The Holy One did not ask him to travel light. He asked him to travel with the ones he had already begun to change.