In (Genesis 13:10), Lot "lifted up his eyes and saw the whole plain of the Jordan, that it was well watered everywhere." A simple observation about good farmland. But the ancient Aramaic translators of Targum Jonathan saw something far darker in that gaze, and their single added word transforms the entire story.
The Targum says Lot "uplifted his eyes towards fornication"—and then beheld the well-watered plain. The translators did not describe what Lot saw. They described what Lot wanted. His eyes were already seeking sin before they landed on the landscape. The lush Jordan Valley was not the temptation. It was the excuse. Lot chose Sodom not despite its wickedness but because of it.
The Targum also explains the dispute between <strong>Abraham's</strong> shepherds and Lot's shepherds in a way the Hebrew never does. In Genesis, we learn only that "there was strife" (Genesis 13:7). The Targum fills in the details: Abraham had specifically instructed his shepherds not to graze among the Canaanites and Perizzites, and to restrain their cattle from trespassing on others' pastures. Lot's shepherds ignored these rules entirely, "feeding in the grounds of the Kenaanaee and Pherizaee." The argument was not about grazing rights. It was about ethics—Abraham demanded scrupulous honesty while Lot's people took whatever they pleased.
The depravity of Sodom also gets a far more detailed treatment. Where Genesis says only that "the men of Sodom were wicked and sinners" (Genesis 13:13), the Targum catalogs their crimes: they "sinned in their bodies," "sinned with open nakedness," shed "innocent blood," and "practiced strange worship." Four distinct categories of transgression, escalating from personal corruption to idolatry. The translators wanted no ambiguity about what made Sodom worthy of destruction.
And one quiet addition changes the theology of the whole chapter. Lot prospered, the Targum notes, only because he "was remembered through the righteousness of Abraham." Every sheep and ox Lot owned was borrowed merit. When he walked toward Sodom, he was spending someone else's spiritual credit.