This is one of the strangest moments in Targum Pseudo-Jonathan's creation story — and one of its most famous. The Torah simply says God made "two great lights." The Targum on (Genesis 1:16) tells us they were originally equal. Exactly equal.
The sun and the moon ruled the sky together for twenty-one years, "less six hundred and two and seventy parts of an hour." The Targumist is showing his math. Two lights, identical in glory, sharing heaven.
Then something broke. "The moon recited against the sun a false report." A slander. A whisper. The Aramaic does not specify what was said — only that the moon lied. And for that sin of speech, the moon was diminished. She shrank. The sun became the greater light, ruling the day. The moon became the lesser, ruling the night, and the stars were given to her as a kind of consolation prize, a softening of the verdict.
What this says about lashon hara
Jewish tradition takes evil speech — lashon hara — extraordinarily seriously. Here, in the fourth day of creation, the first recorded sin in the universe is not murder. It is not theft. It is slander, spoken by one luminary against another. And the punishment is immediate and permanent. The moon is never restored to equality.
This is the Targumist's warning, smuggled into cosmology. Speech has consequences strong enough to rearrange the sky. When the sages later teach that a destructive word can never be fully recalled, they are echoing this moment: a tongue cost the moon her glory, and the night is darker for it.