Modern Compilations & Folklore
335 passagesc. 2nd-13th century CEHebrew / AramaicPD-US-pre-1929
Individual passages from Hebraic Literature (1901), shown in source order. Page 1 of 7.
The Rabbis teach that three things come into the world directly from the hand of the Holy One, never secondhand. Famine. Plenty. And a wise ruler. For famine, Scripture says, The L...
At the most joyful festival in the Jewish year, the Simchat Beit HaShoevah, the Rejoicing of the House of the Water Drawing, held on the nights of Sukkot, the Sages did things you ...
During the nights of Sukkot, the Second Temple in Jerusalem lit up like nothing the world had ever seen. In the Court of the Women stood four giant golden lamp-stands, each crowned...
When Jacob died in Egypt and his sons carried his body back to the land of Canaan for burial, an unusual procession formed. The sons of Esau, the sons of Ishmael, and the sons of K...
Scattered through the old anthologies is a trove of one-line sayings, proverbs the Rabbis handed down the way other peoples pass down songs. The 1901 collection Hebraic Literature ...
A Jewish merchant died abroad, far from his family, in the house of a stranger. Years later, his grown son traveled to find the merchant's hidden property. But the man who had inhe...
Two great sages, Rav Ami and Rav Assi, sat one day in the company of Rabbi Isaac Naphcha, and the three men fell into conversation. One of them turned and said, "Rabbi, tell us a b...
Rabbi Yochanan ben Nuri taught that the priesthood did not begin with Aaron. It began with Noah's son. "The Holy One, blessed be He," the Rabbi said, "set aside Shem, separating hi...
The Talmud (Shabbat 89a-b) notices something strange: the mountain where Israel received the Torah is called by five different names in the Hebrew Bible. Why? Because a single moun...
The question hung in the beit midrash: what happened to the ten tribes exiled by Assyria, and will they ever come home? The sages opened (Deuteronomy 29:28) and read: And the Lord ...
The ninth of Maimonides' Thirteen Principles says the Torah will never be changed. The Holy One will not alter His law, nor replace Moses' law with any other. Malachi himself seale...
Some rabbinic teaching comes as narrative. Some comes as argument. And some comes as short, edged sentences that land like stones. Here is a handful from the Proverbial Sayings and...
A young man traveling through the country met a young woman, and they fell in love. When he had to leave her town, they swore to wait for each other until they could marry. "Who wi...
When Boaz sent Ruth home in the early morning, he poured into her shawl "six measures of barley" (Ruth 3:15). The sages, reading closely, asked: can this really mean six grains, so...
The people of Israel once came before God with a complaint that only a working people could make. Rabbi Eliezer preserved their words: "We are anxious to be occupied day and night ...
Rabbi Achiya, the son of Abba, used to tell this story of a Sabbath he spent in the town of Ludik. He had been invited into the home of a wealthy man. The table was laid with a sum...
The anthologists of the old Hebraic literature gathered Talmudic aphorisms the way a peddler gathers buttons, many small, each perfect. A handful: The rivalry of scholars advances ...
When Maimonides. Rabbi Moshe ben Maimon, known to Jewish tradition as the Rambam, fled the persecutions in Andalusia and reached the court of Egypt in the late twelfth century, the...
When Nimrod the wicked cast Abraham into the fiery furnace for smashing his father's idols, the angel Gabriel stepped forward in the heavenly court. Ribbono shel Olam, Master of th...
Rabbi Yochanan and Rabbi Yonathan walked the road one afternoon until it split in two. One path ran past the door of an idol shrine. The other ran past a house of ill fame. They ha...
Why, the rabbis ask, did Abraham only now, at the border of Egypt, realize that Sarah was beautiful? Had he never noticed before? One reading of (Genesis 12:11) goes like this. Abr...
The rabbis counted the wounds and found that five had opened on the seventeenth of Tammuz and five more on the ninth of Av, the two fast days that frame the Three Weeks of summer m...
A man should study less on Friday, the kabbalists teach, and spend the saved hours preparing for the Sabbath. This is one of the stranger reversals in Jewish life. Normally Torah s...
The rabbis of the Talmud and midrash did not only tell stories. They minted aphorisms, tight as coins, that still circulate in Jewish conversation two millennia later. Here are a d...
A folk legend survived about how Moses ben Maimon, known to the world as Maimonides or the Rambam (1138-1204), supposedly fled the court of his king in Egypt. The story is unhistor...
The Emperor Antoninus once pressed Rabbi Judah the Prince with a sharp question. At the day of judgment, he said, neither body nor soul could be justly punished. The body would ple...
Rabbi Yochanan, speaking in the name of Yossi the son of Zimra, asked about a verse that the eye passes over too quickly. What shall be given unto thee, or what shall be added unto...
A difficult case came before the elders. A young man was suspected of illegitimate birth, and the Rabbis disagreed about his status. Rabbi Yehoshua ruled that he was a ben niddah, ...
When Abraham came to the cave of Machpelah to bury Sarah, he did not find the cave empty. According to the Yalkut Chadash, the first couple was already there, and they were not ple...
When Achan took the banned spoil from Jericho, the book of Joshua describes his crime with a strange fivefold repetition. They have transgressed my covenant which I commanded them;...
A strange statistic is buried in tractate Yoma. During the 410 years of the First Temple, only eighteen high priests served in succession. During the 420 years of the Second Temple...
As Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi drew near the end of his earthly career, the angel of death was sent to fetch him. Because of the Rabbi's merit, the angel was instructed to show him eve...
The prophet Isaiah puts a complaint into the mouth of Zion. The Lord has forsaken me, my Lord has forgotten me (Isaiah 49:14). The community of Israel, in the Talmud's reading, spe...
There was once a man named Joseph who was famous in his city for one thing above all others: he honored the Shabbat. Every Friday his table groaned under fish and wine, whatever th...
A band of robbers once stopped a group of travelers and demanded to know who they were. Disciples of Rabbi Akiva, the travelers answered. The robbers lowered their weapons and said...
Of the four sages who entered Pardes, the mystical orchard of divine secrets, one emerged and lost his belief. His name was Elisha ben Abuyah, and the tradition eventually renamed ...
Two men died on the same day in the same city. One was a great and righteous sage. The other was a tax collector, a known sinner. Both funeral processions met in the same narrow st...
A fox once persuaded a wolf to slip into a Jewish household to help prepare the Shabbat meal. No sooner did the wolf step through the door than the whole household rose up and beat...
A man once wagered his friend four hundred zuzim that he could make Hillel the Elder lose his temper. Win and keep the money, lose and pay it out. The bet made him inventive. It wa...
Near the end of his life, Rabbi Eliezer ben Hyrcanus lay on his sickbed and pressed his disciples with a strange complaint. Had you come to study with me during these last years, h...
Rabbi Yochanan once taught that the royal mount of King Yannai (the Hasmonean Alexander Jannaeus, who reigned 103 to 76 BCE) contained sixty myriads of cities. Each city held a pop...
When Noah released a bird to test whether the floodwaters had receded, the Torah tells us he sent out a raven (Genesis 8:7). The midrash on this verse imagines an argument breaking...
Isaiah writes, For My own sake, for My own sake will I do it (Isaiah 48:11). Why the repetition? Why does God say for My own sake twice? The midrash on this verse, preserved in Mid...
A kabbalistic manual preserved in Kitzur Shalah (an abridgment of the early seventeenth century ethical-mystical work Shenei Luchot HaBrit by Rabbi Isaiah Horowitz) describes the p...
Rabbi Meir, the great fourth-generation Tanna and student of Rabbi Akiva, taught that when a father teaches his son a trade, he should pair the lessons of the craft with the prayer...
The Talmud and midrashim collected thousands of pithy sayings, the pitgamim that teachers would fire off at students to make a point stick. Here is a short bouquet, preserved in Ha...
In the Temple of Jerusalem, the most fragrant service of the day was the burning of the ketoret, the compound incense of eleven spices that rose in a thin column from the golden al...
Rabbi Moshe ben Maimon, known by Jews as the Rambam and by the wider world as Maimonides (1138 to 1204), did something no one had done before him. He took the vast, tangled ocean o...
