Genesis 27 is one of the most psychologically complex chapters in the Torah—the aged Isaac, blind and dying, tricked by his own wife and son into blessing the wrong heir. The Targum Jonathan doesn't just translate this story. It rewrites the entire moral framework.
Start with Isaac's blindness. The Hebrew Bible simply says his eyes were dim. The Targum gives the reason: when Abraham bound Isaac on the altar, Isaac looked upward and saw the Throne of Glory itself. That vision damaged his eyes. His blindness isn't a sign of weakness—it's a scar from encountering the divine presence directly. He saw too much.
The timing matters too. The Targum specifies that Isaac called Esau on the fourteenth of Nisan—the night of Passover. "This night they on high praise the Lord of the world, and the treasures of the dew are opened." The blessing isn't just a family matter. It's happening on the most cosmically significant night of the year, when heaven itself is open.
Rebekah doesn't simply overhear Isaac's instructions to Esau. The Targum says she learned of the plan "by the Holy Spirit." Her deception isn't a desperate scheme—it's divinely guided prophecy. She tells Jacob to bring two kids: one for the Passover offering and one for the festival sacrifice. Even the trickery is ritually correct.
The garments Rebekah dresses Jacob in aren't just Esau's best clothes. They are "the pleasant vestments which had formerly been Adam's"—the primordial garments from the Garden of Eden, passed down through the generations and somehow kept in Rebekah's house. Jacob approaches his father wearing the original clothing of humanity.
When Jacob serves the meal, there's no wine. The Targum says an angel appeared and provided wine "which had been kept in its grapes from the days of the beginning of the world." Primeval wine for a primeval blessing. Isaac smells Jacob's garments and smells not goatskin but "the fragrant incense which is to be offered on the mountain of the house of the sanctuary"—the future Temple.
Then Esau arrives, and the Targum delivers its most devastating addition. God had deliberately prevented Esau from finding clean game. What did Esau actually bring his father? The Targum says he "found a certain dog, and killed him, and made food of him." He served his father dog meat. When Isaac smelled Esau's food, "the smell rose in his nostrils as the smell of the burning of Gehennam." Isaac didn't just realize the wrong son had been blessed—he smelled hell itself on the plate before him.
Esau's final monologue is chilling. The Targum has him think: "I will not do as Cain did, who slew Abel in the lifetime of his father, for which his father begat Seth. I will wait until my father dies, and then I will kill Jacob, and be found both the killer and the heir." Rebekah learns this—again through the Holy Spirit—and sends Jacob away to Laban.