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Moses stood on the summit of Mount Nebo, and God showed him the entire Land of Israel. The Torah specifies that he saw "the valley of Jericho" (Deuteronomy 34:3). The Mekhilta find...
Jacob was one of the four righteous people whom God gave a hint about the future. But Jacob, the Mekhilta says, failed to take the hint — and the consequences reveal something prof...
David was one of the four righteous people given a divine hint — and unlike Jacob and Moses, David recognized his and acted on it with confidence. The hint came disguised as a pair...
Mordechai was the fourth of the righteous people given a divine hint — and like David, he recognized it immediately. The Mekhilta finds his hint in a single verse from the Book of ...
God declared in (Exodus 17:14): "For erase shall I erase the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven." The sages of the Mekhilta noticed something peculiar about this verse. Why do...
The Torah's commandment to erase the memory of Amalek reaches to the farthest limit of destruction. The Mekhilta de-Rabbi Ishmael explains the phrase (Exodus 17:14) "from under the...
When Amalek attacked Israel in the wilderness, Moses did not simply organize a military response. He turned to God with an argument that struck at the heart of the divine project i...
Rabbi Elazar Hamodai offered his own version of Moses' prayer during the battle with Amalek, and it carried an even more cosmic weight than Rabbi Yehoshua's teaching. Moses said be...
Rabbi Elazar Hamodai posed a question that pointed toward the end of history itself: When will the name of Amalek finally be erased from the earth? The answer was not tied to any b...
After Israel's victory over Amalek at Rephidim, Moses built an altar and gave it a striking name. The verse records: "And Moses built an altar and he called its name 'the L-rd is m...
The Mekhilta reveals one of the most intimate teachings about the relationship between God and Israel: whenever a miracle is performed for the Jewish people, that miracle is not ju...
(Exodus 17:16) preserves a cryptic declaration: "For the hand is by the throne of Kah: the L-rd is at war with Amalek from generation to generation." The Mekhilta, through Rabbi Ye...
Rabbi Elazar Hamodai taught that God did not merely command the destruction of Amalek—He swore it. And the oath was no ordinary vow. God swore by His throne of glory, the highest a...
R. Eliezer says: The L–rd swears by His throne of glory: If there comes a man of all the nations to be proselytized, he will be accepted; but Amalek and his household will not be a...
Variantly: "from generation to generation": R. Yehoshua says: "from generation"—the life of this world: "to generation"—the life of the world to come. R. Eliezer Hamodai says: from...
(Exodus 18:1) "And Yithro heard": What did he hear that caused him to come (and join Israel)? The war with Amalek, which is juxtaposed with this section. These are the words of R. ...
R. Eliezer says: Yithro heard the splitting of the sea and came (to join Israel). For the splitting of the sea was heard from one end of the world to the other, viz. (Joshua 5:1) "...
They said: Rachav the harlot was ten years old when Israel left Egypt, and all forty years that Israel was in the desert, she plied her trade. At the end of fifty years, she conver...
Yithro, the father-in-law of Moses, had seven names — and the Mekhilta explains that each name encoded a different aspect of his extraordinary character. Yether — because he "added...
The Mekhilta DeRabbi Yishmael preserves a fascinating tradition about the name of Jethro, Moses's father-in-law. His name was not always Jethro. In the beginning, the Torah calls h...
The Mekhilta teaches that there are people in the Torah whose very names were diminished — literally shrunk — because of their actions. The prime example is Efron the Hittite, the ...
The Mekhilta offers another example of a name diminished by moral failure: Yonadav, originally called Yehonadav. The difference is a single element — the divine syllable "Yeho," de...
What was Yithro's role in Midian before he joined Moses and the people of Israel? The verse calls him "the Cohein of Midian" (Exodus 18:1), and two rabbis disagreed about what "Coh...
The Mekhilta notices something peculiar about how the Torah identifies Yithro. In the beginning of the story, Moses is the one who boasts about the relationship. When Moses returns...
When Jethro heard "that the Lord had taken Israel out of Egypt," the Mekhilta draws a remarkable conclusion: the Exodus is not just one miracle among many. It is the miracle agains...
The Torah states that Yithro "took Tzipporah, Moses' wife, after she had been sent" (Exodus 18:2). The phrase "after she had been sent" is vague — sent where? By whom? Under what c...
R. Elazar says: after she parted from him with a ma'amar (i.e., by word of mouth). For when the L–rd said to Moses: Go and take My people, the children of Israel, out of Egypt, viz...
R. Elazar Homadai says: in a land of foreign (gods, i.e., idolatry). Moses said: Since the whole world serves idolatry, I will serve Him who spoke and brought the (whole) world int...
Rabbi Elazar ben Azaryah made a bold claim about how deeply the Torah regards circumcision. The foreskin, he taught, is so repulsive in the eyes of God that Scripture uses "uncircu...
Rebbi — Rabbi Yehuda HaNasi, the compiler of the Mishnah (the earliest code of rabbinic law) — declared that circumcision was so great that all of Moses' accumulated merits could n...
R. Yossi says: G–d forbid that tzaddik (a righteous person)im (the righteous) should be lax in circumcision for even a short while, but Moses expounded: Shall he circumcise (his so...
(Exodus 18:4) "and the name of the second, 'Eliezer,' for (Moses said: 'The G–d of (Elokei) my father was my help (ezri), and He saved me from the 'sword of Pharaoh.'" R. Yehoshua ...
When Pharaoh sent soldiers to hunt down Moses after the slaying of the Egyptian taskmaster, God intervened in a way no one expected. Rather than striking the pursuers dead or sendi...
A small textual puzzle in the book of Exodus reveals something important about Moses' family. The verse states (Exodus 18:5): "And Yithro, Moses' father-in-law, and his sons and hi...
R. Eliezer says: The Holy One Blessed be He said to Moses: I am the one who spoke and brought the world into being. I am the one who draws near and not the one who distances, viz. ...
The Mekhilta DeRabbi Yishmael describes the extraordinary reception that Jethro received when he arrived at the Israelite camp in the wilderness. The verse states simply: "And Mose...
"and he bowed down to him and he kissed him": I would not know who bowed down to whom or who kissed whom, were it not written (Ibid.) "And they greeted, a man, his neighbor, in pea...
When Moses sat down with his father-in-law Yithro after the exodus from Egypt, he did not simply give a dry report of events. The Mekhilta explains that Moses "related to his fathe...
When the Torah says that Yithro "rejoiced over all the good" that God had done for Israel (Exodus 18:9), the rabbis asked a natural question: which specific good was Yithro rejoici...
R. Elazar Hamodai offered a different explanation for what made Yithro rejoice. It was not the manna, he argued, but the miraculous well — the portable spring of water that travele...
R. Eliezer took the debate in yet another direction. When Yithro rejoiced "over all the good," he was not celebrating manna or water. He was rejoicing over the promise of Eretz Yis...
R. Pappis made a statement about Yithro's blessing that was, in his reading, deeply unflattering to Israel. When Yithro arrived at the Israelite camp and heard what God had done, h...
The Mekhilta offers a striking interpretation of the phrase "from the hand of Egypt and from the hand of Pharaoh" (Exodus 18:10). Why does the verse mention both Egypt and Pharaoh ...
Yithro's declaration "Now I know that greater is the Lord than all the gods" (Exodus 18:11) is more remarkable than it first appears. The Mekhilta points out a critical detail: the...
The Mekhilta deepens the significance of Yithro's confession by pointing out that he was uniquely qualified to make it. "There was no idolatry in the world that Yithro did not come...
The verse records a startling act (Exodus 18:12): "Yithro, Moses' father-in-law, took a burnt-offering and peace-offerings for sacrifice to God." The Mekhilta says that Scripture d...
The verse says that Aaron and all the elders of Israel came to eat bread with Moses' father-in-law "before God." But the Mekhilta raises an obvious question: where was Moses himsel...
They said: This thing was expounded by R. Tzaddok, viz.: When R. Gamliel made a feast for the sages, all the sages of Israel were seated before him and R. Gamliel arose and served ...
