930 passages in Modern Compilations & Folklore
Individual passages from Exempla of the Rabbis (Gaster, 1924), shown in source order. Page 15 of 20.
Seven Good Years when Young. Midr. Zutta (Ruth) ed. Buber, p. 55. Nissim, f. 36b. Yalk. II, § 607. Rappaport, R. Nissim. Husin, Maase Nissim, No. 33. Yalk. Sip. Ill, pp. 107, no. c...
The prophet Elijah came to a young man with a simple offer. He could have seven good years of prosperity, either at the beginning of his life or at the end. The choice was his. The...
Rabbi Akiba was the greatest sage of his generation, but even he could not escape the anxieties of a father. The astrologers had warned him: his daughter was destined to die on her...
It was prophesied to Rabbi Akiva that his beloved daughter would die on the day of her wedding. Akiva was a student of signs and omens; he believed the prediction. But he also beli...
A desperately poor woman came before the prophet Elijah with nothing in the world except a single coin. She had no family to support her, no trade to sustain her, and no prospect o...
Rabbi Abraham of Ashkelon was known in his city for the regularity of his prayers. He never missed the appointed hours; his Shacharit, Minchah, and Maariv were as steady as the sun...
The tale of "Wickedness Defeated" follows a pattern known across many cultures: a contest between cleverness and brute evil, in which the clever hero outwits a far more powerful ad...
The halachah is clear: a man must not leave the synagogue before the chazzan finishes the Amidah, and must not pass a synagogue without entering it to pray. Gaster's Exempla (No. 3...
When Moses sent twelve spies into the land of Canaan to scout the territory before the Israelite invasion, ten of them came back terrified. "We saw giants there," they reported. "T...
When Moses sent twelve spies into the land of Canaan, the legend of the Rabbis remembers that the land was inhabited by giants, not merely tall men but beings of such scale that a ...
The Midrash (Pesikta Rabbati 19, Tanhuma Pinehas) tells a cautionary tale about gluttony, the sin of making the stomach into a god, of subordinating every other value to the next m...
The rabbis preserved a small, cutting anecdote about a wealthy pagan whose appetite had outgrown his reason. He sat down one evening at his fine marble dining table, which had been...
Butcher Companion in Paradise. Ben Atar, No. 13, f. 31a. Midr. Decalogue, V, 2. Nissim, f. 20a. Zabara, Shaashuin ed. Davidson, p. 1. Eliah Cohen, Meil Se- daka § 441. Heilperin, S...
Rabbi Joshua ben Levi, a third-century sage famous in the Talmud for his conversations with the prophet Elijah and with the Angel of Death, once asked a question only a very confid...
Money Recovered by Trick. Yoma, f. 83 b. Pesikta R. ch. 22. Ben Atar, No. 6, f. 25 a. Midr. Decalogue III, 3; VIII, 2. Nissim, f. 25 a. Yalk. Sip. II, p. 149. Maase Buch No. 215. H...
A man in a certain town buried a sum of money in his garden for safekeeping. He thought no one had seen. He was wrong. His neighbor, watching through a gap in the wall, waited a da...
A man from the Galilee once traveled to Jerusalem for the three festival pilgrimages. On his way home, rather than carry all his coin across the dangerous roads, he entrusted two h...
The sages taught that a single good deed, performed at the right moment, with the right intention, can tip the scales of a person's entire life. The story of "Reward for a Single P...
A rich man, old and childless, prayed for years for a son. In his advanced age God granted him one. He named the boy Saul, after the first king of Israel, and lavished everything o...
The Midrash on the Ten Commandments tells the story of a faithful woman whose devotion was tested beyond what most people could endure. And who emerged triumphant. A certain man wa...
A man lay dying, and he gave his son one final instruction. With the money I leave you, go and trade. Put it to work. The son refused. People who trade are cheats, he told his fath...
The medieval Jewish collection known as the Parables of Solomon preserves a story about a man whose faithfulness was tested in the most extreme circumstances, a test that proved, t...
Someone once asked King Solomon about a famously bitter line he had written in (Ecclesiastes 7:28), "One man among a thousand have I found; but a woman among all those have I not f...
King Solomon, the wisest man who ever lived, was once brought a legal case so subtle that its resolution required the full depth of his legendary understanding. The dispute centere...
The servants of King David were sitting together eating eggs. One of them finished his egg while the others were still eating theirs, and he felt embarrassed to be sitting empty-ha...
Miraculous Herbs. Eisenstein, Oser, p. 348. Maase Buch No. 224. Helvicus, Historien I, ch. 39, p. 159. Levi, R. E. J. XXXIII, p. 67 ff. Ben Gorion I, 306, 380. Bolte & Polivka, II,...
Gaster's Exempla (1924), No. 330, tells a folktale of two brothers. One was rich. The other was poor and had many children. The rich brother took one of the poor brother's sons, a ...
Pinetyas b. Yair’s Wonderful Deeds. Shekalim, V. § 1. J. Demai, I, 3. cf. Deut. R. 3 § 3. Nissim, f. 27 b. Lonzano, Maarikh, ed. Jellinek, f. 112 b f. Eliah Cohen, Meil Se- * • dak...
Pinhas ben Yair was a second-century rabbi remembered for an unnerving combination of piety and practical wisdom. He was the son-in-law of Rabbi Shimon ben Yochai, and stories abou...
Shimon ben Shetah, the great teacher of the Second Temple era and a leader of the Sanhedrin, stands at the center of two linked tales preserved in the Jerusalem Talmud (Hagigah 2:2...
In the coastal city of Ashkelon, two men died on the same day. One was Baya, the local tax collector, a figure the community despised. The other was a gentle Torah scholar. Both pr...
Mar Ukba's generosity was legendary, but it was a woman named Hannah who embodied the even higher virtue of righteous silence. The Talmud (Shabbat 56b, Sanhedrin 31b) preserves her...
Gaster's exemplum No. 333 tells a longer, stranger story of Mar Ukva, the same Babylonian exilarch celebrated for his secret charity, before he became the man of secret charity. Ma...
Grateful Dead. Pesikta, f. 164 a. Tanh. Deut. Haazinu §8. Adhan, Bineot Deshe, f. 25 b. Shaare Jerushalayim, p. 88, 90, No. 4. Sef. Hamaasiyot ed. Araki Cohen ch. 90. Archiv f. Sla...
A dying father called his only son to the bedside and left him two pieces of advice: occupy yourself with Torah study, and give generously to tzedakah. The inheritance he handed on...
A rich man had one son. When the son turned eighteen, he begged his father for permission to travel to a famous academy. The father let him go, and three times over three years the...
King Solomon and King Hiram of Tyre once marched their armies to opposite banks of a river. Tension rose. Solomon, worried his soldiers would collapse in the sun, summoned birds to...
Wars of Jacob against Sichem. Midr. Hagadol Gen. Vayyehi, f. 153 a. Midr. Vayisau. cf. Gen. R. ch. 80, 97. Jerahmeel, ed. Gaster XXXVI, 6, p. 80 and Introd. p. XXXI f. Bahya Com. G...
The Torah tells the story quickly — too quickly, the rabbis felt. Dinah, the daughter of Jacob and Leah, was taken and violated by Shechem, the prince of the local city. Her ...
A woman who had lived a life of cruelty and false piety was shown, after her death, the punishments awaiting her in Gehinnom. This exemplum, gathered by Gaster from Eisenstein's Ot...
A ma'aseh preserved among the Gaster manuscripts tells the story of a rich man and his wife who were, by every measure, bad people. Their house had four walls, and in one of those ...
There was once a pious scholar who left behind a son, Rabbi Isaac, greater in learning and piety than himself, and a dayyan, a judge in the Jewish court. On the eve of Rosh Hashana...
Moses stood apart from every other prophet who ever lived. The rabbis taught that while other prophets saw God through clouded glass, Moses alone saw through a clear lens, an unobs...
An Aramean king ruling in one of the cities of the Land of Israel once assembled the Jews of his domain and issued a decree. If they could prove to him the superiority of Moses and...
The daughter of Rabbi Meir, one of the greatest sages of the second century CE, had a vision in a dream that her fate was sealed. Twenty-one years of suffering lay ahead. Seven yea...
The story of Solomon and the boiled egg appears in multiple collections, each version adding new details to the king's legendary wisdom. In this telling, drawn from German and Jewi...
In the time of King David (who reigned c. 1010 to 970 BCE) there were three years of famine across the land of Israel. A poor man with nine sons and daughters went without food for...
Solomon and the ant, a story that combines the king's legendary wisdom with a creature so small that most people would crush it without a thought. The Midrash (rabbinic interpretiv...
