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Part One · Chapter Twenty-Seven — Onkelos
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Onkelos the proselyte was most accomplished in the Hebrew and the Aramaic tongues. And he made it his fixed purpose to remove corporealism: every description that Scripture gives which leads to corporeality, he interprets according to its true sense. And whatever he finds of these nouns that signify some kind of motion, he renders the sense of the motion as a self-revealing and the appearing of created light — I mean Shekhinah — or as solicitude.
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Thus he rendered 'the Lord will come down' (Exod 19:11): 'the Lord will reveal Himself.' And 'the Lord came down' (Exod 19:20): 'the Lord revealed Himself.' And he did not say 'the Lord descended.'
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'I will go down now, and see' (Gen 18:21): 'I will reveal Myself now, and see.' And this is consistent throughout his rendering.
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But he rendered 'I will go down with thee into Egypt' (Gen 46:4): 'I Myself will descend with thee to Egypt.' And this is a very remarkable case, which shows the perfection of this master, the soundness of his interpretation, and his grasp of things as they truly are. And by this rendering he also opened up for us a great point among the points of prophecy.
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For at the beginning of this account it says: 'and God spake unto Israel in the visions of the night, and said, Jacob, Jacob' (Gen 46:2), and so on; 'and He said, I am God' (Gen 46:3), and so on; 'I will go down with thee into Egypt.' Since the opening of the speech guaranteed that it was in the visions of the night, Onkelos did not shrink from reporting verbatim the speech that was said in the visions of the night — and that is correct.
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For this is the report of what was said, not the report of an event that took place — like 'and the Lord came down upon Mount Sinai' (Exod 19:20), which is the report of what happened among the existent things, and which therefore he figured by 'revealing' and stripped of anything indicating the occurrence of motion. But imaginary matters — I mean the reporting of what was said to him — he left as they were. And this is wonderful.
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And from here you should take note that there is a great difference between what is said to be 'in a dream' or 'in the visions of the night,' and what is said to be 'in a vision' or 'in an apparition,' and what is said absolutely: 'and the word of the Lord came unto me, saying,' or 'and the Lord said unto me.'
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And it is also possible, in my view, that Onkelos took the 'God' spoken of here to be an angel, and therefore did not object to saying of Him, 'I will descend with thee to Egypt.' And do not find it strange that he should hold the 'God' here to be an angel, even though He says to him 'I am God, the God of thy father' (Gen 46:3); for this very utterance, with this wording, comes by the agency of an angel as well.
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Do you not see that it says, 'and the angel of God spake unto me in a dream, Jacob; and I said, Here am I' (Gen 31:11); and at the end of the report of His address to him: 'I am the God of Bethel, where thou anointedst a pillar, where thou vowedst a vow unto Me' (Gen 31:13). And there is no doubt that Jacob vowed to God, not to the angel.
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But this is regular in the utterances of the prophets — I mean, the reporting of the things the angel tells them on God's behalf in the wording of God's own address to them — and all of it is by deletion of the construct-term, as though he said: 'I am the messenger of the God of thy father'; 'I am the messenger of the God who revealed Himself to thee at Bethel,' and the like. And much will come on prophecy and its ranks, and on the angels, in accordance with the aim of this treatise.