After burying Rachel on the road to Ephrath, Jacob kept walking. He pitched his tent in a quiet, unremarkable place — Migdal Eder, the Tower of the Flock, a shepherd's watchtower on the hills south of Bethlehem.
The Hebrew verse gives us only the location. But Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 35:21) cannot let such a place pass without a blaze of prophecy: the place from whence, it is to be, the King Meshiha will be revealed at the end of the days.
The Targumist is drawing a line across centuries. The same ridge where Jacob mourned his wife is the ridge where, one day, the Mashiach will stand revealed. The prophet Micah will later echo this, singling out the Tower of the Flock as the place where the ancient kingdom will be restored (Micah 4:8). Bethlehem — a few fields away — will produce David, and through David's line, the final redeemer.
Why Migdal Eder? Because it is a shepherd's watchtower. Judaism's kings are shepherds before they are kings — David in the hills of Bethlehem, Moses at the burning bush, Jacob himself tending Laban's flocks. The Messiah will be revealed where shepherds watch, not where emperors sit.
Jacob pitched his tent on top of the future. He did not know it. But the Targumist wants us to know it — so that every hilltop we rest on might be a place where redemption is waiting to rise.