When Esau and Jacob finally reunited after twenty years of separation, the Bible says Esau ran to his brother, embraced him, kissed him, and they wept (Genesis 33:4). It sounds like a tender reconciliation. The Targum Jonathan, the Aramaic translation dating to roughly the 1st-2nd century CE, sees it very differently.
According to the Targum, Esau wept because of the pain in his teeth, which were shaken. Jacob wept because of the pain in his neck. The implication is striking: Esau tried to bite Jacob's neck, but Jacob's neck miraculously hardened—perhaps turned to marble or ivory, as other rabbinic sources describe—and Esau's teeth cracked against it. What looks like a kiss was actually an attempted bite. What looks like weeping from emotion was weeping from physical pain. The Targum transforms a scene of brotherly love into a scene of failed violence.
The Targum also adds a remarkable detail about Joseph. When Jacob arranged his family to meet Esau, the standard text says Joseph and Rachel came last. The Targum specifies that Joseph deliberately stood in front of Rachel and "hid her by his stature." A young boy—Joseph was perhaps six or seven years old at this point—physically shielded his mother from Esau's gaze. The Targum sees Joseph's protective instincts as already active in childhood.
The lineup order itself gets a grim Targumic explanation. Jacob placed the concubines and their children first, not for protocol, but because he calculated that if Esau came to "destroy the children and abuse the women," he would start with them—buying time for Leah's and Rachel's families to escape or fight.
After the reunion, the Targum says God performed a miracle: Esau simply turned around and left. No lingering, no escort. The text calls it explicitly "a miracle was wrought for Jacob." Then Jacob traveled to Succoth, where he stayed twelve months—and the Targum adds that he built a midrash (rabbinic interpretive commentary)a there, a house of study. Even in temporary encampments, Jacob established places of Torah learning. The Targum reimagines the patriarch not just as a herdsman returning home, but as a teacher building institutions wherever he stopped.