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You are walking along a road. Across the field you see an ox. It is the ox of a man you cannot stand. You know, privately, he has done wicked things. Your dislike is not petty — it...
The ox that wanders free was one thing. This case is harder. The donkey has collapsed under its load. Its owner — a man you dislike for good reason — is struggling to lift it. And ...
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...
The gift arrives quietly. A gesture of friendship, perhaps. A token. The judge tells himself he can take it without being influenced. He is a man of integrity. He has ruled fairly ...
It would have been enough to say: rest on the seventh day. That alone would have been a radical gift in the ancient world. But the Torah cannot stop there. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan o...
Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on Exodus (Exodus 23:13) gives an unusual command: of all the precepts that I have spoken to you, be careful; and the names of the idols of the Gentiles reme...
The plain Hebrew of (Exodus 24:12) reads simply that God promised Moses the tablets of stone, the Torah, and the commandment. The Targum Pseudo-Jonathan cannot leave it that spare....
The shoulder-stones of the ephod were not to be carved roughly. The Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Exodus 28:11) insists the engraver work as the engraving of a ring — every letter dis...
Most translations of (Exodus 28:39) describe the weaving of the tunic and leave it there. The Targum Pseudo-Jonathan refuses that minimalism. Each garment atones for something spec...
Of all the ordination rites, this one is the strangest. Moses slaughtered the second ram, and the Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Exodus 29:20) tells us exactly what he did with the blo...
One of the most radical moments in Torah commerce: Targum Pseudo-Jonathan repeats the Torah's command that the rich shall not add to, and the poor shall not diminish from, the half...
Targum Pseudo-Jonathan does not soften the law. It specifies the method: "Whoso doeth work upon the Sabbath, dying he shall die, by the casting of stones" (Exodus 31:15). Stoning, ...
This is the verse that unlocks the whole story. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan fills in what the plain Hebrew leaves as silence: "For Aaron had seen Hur slain before him, and was afraid; a...
When Moses confronted his brother at the foot of Sinai, Aaron did not hide behind excuses or blame the mob. He answered with a kind of anguished theology. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan, t...
After the sword went through the camp, the Levites stood with blood on their hands. They had killed brothers, neighbors, friends. And Moses turned to them with a startling instruct...
Not everyone watched Moses walk to the tabernacle with reverence. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan, the Aramaic paraphrase of the Torah, catches a detail the plain text leaves hidden. "When ...
Having promised to drive out the six nations, God gave Moses a warning about the mistake that would undo everything. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan, the Aramaic paraphrase of the Torah, re...
God extended the warning about treaties into a warning about tables. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan, the Aramaic paraphrase of the Torah, renders the progression clearly. "Lest you strike ...
The Torah's cryptic warning not to boil a kid in its mother's milk (Exodus 34:26) becomes, in Targum Pseudo-Jonathan, something much more expansive — and much more alarming. The Ta...
There is a right way to speak of offerings, and the wrong way offends the Holy One. Midrash Tanchuma Buber, Bereshit 6:1 preserves a sharp teaching from R. Shimon ben Yochai, the s...
