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A student once came to Rabbi Preida and asked him to teach a particular passage of Mishnah. Rabbi Preida sat with him and went through it slowly. The student did not understand. Th...
Acheer once pressed Rabbi Meir with a hard verse: God also has set the one over against the other (Ecclesiastes 7:14). What did it mean? Rabbi Meir offered the simple answer. The H...
The Rabbis of Rosh Hashanah 17a sorted the afterlife into categories. Most of the wicked — those guilty of ordinary sins, the ones who grew coarse through sensuous indulgence rathe...
On a lonely road, Rabbi Akiva met an ugly, exhausted man bent double under a massive bundle of firewood. "I adjure you," Akiva said. "Tell me — are you a man, or are you a demon?" ...
A man named Yochanan once kept a pet frog. The frog, according to the Rabbis, was not a frog at all. It was a child of Lilith, the demon of night. The creature taught Yochanan. Fir...
Here the Targumist drops a myth into the middle of the verse. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 1:21) says the Lord created the great tanninim — sea dragons — and among them Levia...
The Torah says God planted a garden in Eden. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 2:8) goes further. The garden "was planted by the Word of the Lord God before the creation of the wo...
The Torah says simply, "to dust thou shalt return." Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 3:19) refuses to let that be the end. After the dust, the Targumist says, there is one more a...
Just as God consulted the angels to make humanity, He consults them again to remove humanity from paradise. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 3:22) records the divine deliberation...
Adam's expulsion becomes, in Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 3:24), a sweeping theological statement about everything God made before He made anything. God drove the man out fro...
The Hebrew of (Genesis 4:8) is notoriously fragmentary: "Cain said to Abel his brother. And it came to pass, when they were in the field, Cain rose up against Abel his brother and ...
Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 9:6) gives Torah's foundational teaching on the sanctity of human life a haunting expansion. Whoso sheddeth the blood of man, the judges, by witn...
When the sun went down on the covenant between the pieces, Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 15:17) turns the Hebrew's smoking furnace and flaming torch into something far more vi...
The Targum Pseudo-Jonathan, that wild Aramaic expansion of the Torah, hears something in Esau's words that the plain text only hints at. Esau does not just say, "Behold, I am at th...
The Torah's plain verse reads almost like an afterthought. "He ate and drank, and rose up and went his way; thus Esau despised his birthright" (Genesis 25:34). Five short verbs for...
The moment Esau walks in with his meal, the Targum Pseudo-Jonathan tells us something the Hebrew only hints at. "Izhak was moved with great agitation when he heard the voice of Esa...
The Targum Pseudo-Jonathan adds a line the Torah does not spell out and that the Sages treasured. And it was when she spake with Joseph this day and the next, and he hearkened not ...
Of all the seventy souls who went down with Jacob into Egypt, one name hides a secret that will echo across centuries. The Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 46:17) lingers over th...
Here Targum Pseudo-Jonathan gives us one of its boldest expansions. The Hebrew says only: Thou stretched out Thy right hand, the earth swallowed them. The Targum opens this single ...
(Exodus 15:18) in the Hebrew is a single line: The Lord shall reign forever and ever. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan expands it into a full coronation ceremony. When Israel beheld the sign...
The Targum Pseudo-Jonathan closes the Amalek story with one of the most extraordinary vows in the Torah. "Because the Word of the Lord hath sworn by the throne of His glory, that H...
What does it mean to see a sound? The Targum Pseudo-Jonathan takes the strange Hebrew phrase and leans into the miracle. "And all the people saw the thunders, and were turned back,...
A court hands down its verdict. A man is acquitted. He walks free. And then, after the gavel has fallen, new evidence surfaces — evidence that proves he was guilty all along. Or th...
Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Exodus 40:8) takes a simple instruction — set up the court around the tabernacle and hang a curtain at its gate — and turns it into one of the most strik...
(Isaiah 66:22) drops a strange detail that sages noticed and never forgot: "For as the new heavens and the new earth which I make remain before Me." The definite articles — the new...
When did God become "magnified"? Midrash Tanchuma Buber, Bereshit 10:2 answers: at the moment the heavens and earth came into being. And for whose sake did God create them? For Isr...
