The promise to Jacob at Bethel scales. From a single man sleeping on stones, the Word of God opens outward: sons as many as the dust, spreading west, east, north, and south (Genesis 28:14).
The Targum Pseudo-Jonathan adds one Aramaic word that changes the grammar of the blessing. The nations of the earth will be blessed through the righteousness of Jacob and of his sons. Not through their numbers. Not through their conquests. Not through their kings. Through their tzidkuta, their ethical conduct, their covenant fidelity.
This is how the Targum reads the patriarchal promise. When Jewish families keep the Torah, the whole world receives a transfusion of holiness. When Jewish courts render honest judgment, the air the nations breathe gets cleaner. The Hebrew Bible repeats this theme with Isaiah — Israel is to be a light to the nations (Isaiah 42:6). The Targum has already heard it at Bethel.
Dust of the earth is a striking image for a chosen people. Dust is trampled. Dust is scattered by wind. Dust appears to be nothing. And yet — every farmer knows — dust is what grows everything that feeds the world. The Targum is saying: the blessing of the nations travels through the low-down, common, scattered, apparently insignificant righteousness of ordinary Jews in every direction of the compass.
The takeaway: the world is not blessed through Jewish power. It is blessed through Jewish ethics. The promise reaches every family of the earth only when the family of Jacob behaves like a family of Jacob.