Pensée juive sur La Genèse 29:31

(1) Since Jacob did not recognise Reuben, the firstborn son of Leah as the rightful heir to a double portion of his estate,- although he had explained the reasons,- the Torah warns that other fathers must not act in a similar fashion. Should the firstborn son be a sorer umoreh, he loses much more than merely his share in the father's estate. Death for such a person is decreed "because of future developments." It is a preventive penalty, protecting both the son's relative innocence, and society against what would surely have led to greater calamities had such a teenager been allowed to grow up to maturity. (2) Since this is the general tenor in our attitude to the "glutton," the Torah calls him by that name. After all, the objective of thievery is to enable the thief to gratify his physical urges, gluttony amongst them. (3) It is natural for people to feel pity when they come upon a corpse hanging from a tree, and they are apt to curse the perpetrator of such a deed. Since, in this instance, such a curse may inadvertently be aimed at G'd by whose decree the slain person has been hung, the corpse is to be lowered by nightfall, so that those who had been unaware of the judicial execution that preceded the hanging, will not violate the commandment not to curse G'd. (Exodus 22,27) Up to this point, our Parshah lists a series of mitzvot which could be summed up under the heading "one sin brings another in its wake." Now the Torah switches direction, concentrating instead on such mitzvot of which the opposite principle, that of "one good deeds leads to another," holds true. The first in such a series is the commandment of restoring lost property to the loser. The Torah clearly discusses two distinct and separate possibilities here. Either the finder knows the owner of the lost object or animal, and is aware that the owner lives some distance away, or he is unaware who is the owner of the animal he found. At any rate, he must then keep the animal in trust for the owner. (4) The Torah makes the point that when the enemy's animal suffers by not being attended to at once, you must assist. This is the normal situation. Our sages elaborated that at all events one must assist the enemy's animal first, even when the friend's animal suffers by being unloaded later.

This appropriate and satisfactory explanation, the correctness of which I do not doubt, is weakened by three passages, in which, according to this view, I expected to find the verb “to see” paraphrased “to be revealed before him,” but found instead the literal rendering” to see in the various copies of the Targum. The following are the three passages “And God saw that the wickedness of man was great upon the earth” (Gen. 6:6); “And the Lord saw the earth, and behold it was corrupt” (ib. 6:12); “and God saw that Leah was hated” (ib. 29:31). It appears to me that in these passages there is a mistake, which has crept into the copies of the Targum, since we do not possess the Targum in the original manuscript of Onkelos, for in that case we should have assumed that he had a satisfactory explanation of it.