335 passages in Modern Compilations & Folklore
Individual passages from Hebraic Literature (1901), shown in source order. Page 4 of 7.
Before Abraham was a patriarch he was a shopkeeper's son. His father Terach sold idols in Ur, and Abraham, still a boy, worked behind the counter. The customers came in believing t...
No one in Israel, the sages taught, could humble himself more thoroughly than David when a commandment was at stake. Before God he spoke the words of Psalm 131, and the midrash tea...
Devarim Rabbah (chapter 4) preserves a comment of Rabbi Yitzchak on the verse, "When the Lord your God shall enlarge your border, as He has promised you" (Deuteronomy 12:20). It is...
Rabbi Abahu once praised Rav Saphra before a group of heretics, calling him a man of great learning. The heretics, impressed, exempted Saphra from tribute for thirteen years. One d...
The Torah is blunt: An Ammonite or Moabite shall not enter the congregation of the Lord, even to the tenth generation (Deuteronomy 23:4). The verse has stood for a thousand years. ...
Rabbi Yossi gave a teaching that startles the ear. The Shechinah, he said, has never descended below, and Moses and Elijah never truly ascended on high. Heaven and earth keep a sma...
Rav Huna once woke to find that four hundred of his casks of wine had soured into vinegar. This was not an inconvenience. This was ruin. Word spread. Rav Yehudah, the brother of Ra...
A fox was prowling outside a vineyard, one of those walled vineyards common in Judean farming villages. And saw grapes so ripe his mouth watered. But the palings of the fence were ...
The procedure for a capital trial under the Sanhedrin, as preserved in the Mishnah (Sanhedrin 6) and carried forward in the 1901 anthology Hebraic Literature, sounds less like an e...
Rav Yitzchak asked: what did David mean when he wrote, Grant not, O Lord, the desires of the wicked; further not his wicked device, lest they exalt themselves. Selah (Psalms 140:8)...
In the Temple service, everyone bowed thirteen times, corresponding to the thirteen shofar-shaped collection boxes and the thirteen tables arrayed in the sanctuary. But those who b...
The Torah says (Deuteronomy 21:23), His body shall not remain all night upon the tree, but thou shalt in any wise bury him that day; for he that is hanged is accursed of God. The M...
The Talmud tells of Elisha ben Abuyah, called afterward Acher, "Other", one of the four sages who entered the mystical Garden and the only one who emerged a heretic. Somewhere in t...
In the years after the fall of the holy city, a mother named Hannah and her seven sons were thrown into prison. One by one, in order of their ages, the tyrant brought the boys befo...
Although the reading of the Book of Esther, the Megillah, on Purim is not commanded anywhere in the Pentateuch, the Rabbis teach that it is binding on us and on every generation th...
(Genesis 6:6) is one of the most unsettling verses in the Torah: And it repented the Lord that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart. How could the All-Know...
In the days of the Mishnah the rabbis regulated even the meals of mourning. At a funeral feast they ordered ten cups of wine to be drunk in the house of the bereaved, three before ...
The prophet Ezekiel writes, "I have set Jerusalem in the midst of the nations, and countries are round about her" (Ezekiel 5:5). Taken in its plain sense, the verse places the holy...
On the day Solomon sought to bring the Aron, the Ark of the Covenant, into the newly finished Temple, the gates refused to open. Solomon stood before them and began to recite psalm...
Tractate Yoma (folio 9, column 1) asks a question no one would think to ask unless they were counting: how many kohanim gedolim, high priests, served during each of the two Temples...
Scripture says of Samson that "the spirit of the Lord began to move him at times in the camp of Dan, between Zoreah and Eshtaol" (Judges 13:25). The rabbis reading that verse pause...
Ben Hei-Hei came to Hillel with a verse that troubled him. Malachi had said, "Then shall ye return, and discern between the righteous and the wicked, between him that serveth God a...
A philosopher once stood before Rabbi Akiba with a question designed to unsettle him. "If your God loves the poor," the philosopher asked, "why does He not support them Himself? Wh...
The Talmud counts carefully. King David composed one hundred and three psalms, and only after the hundred and third did he allow himself to utter the word Hallelujah. What made him...
A ship docked at an island on its way between two ports. The captain announced that he would weigh anchor at a set hour, and he warned the passengers that a bell would sound three ...
Five times in the two psalms that open Bless the Lord, O my soul (Psalms 103 and 104), David addresses his own soul. Why five? The Rabbis of the Talmud (Berakhot 10a) answer: becau...
The Roman governor Turnus Rufus thought he had caught Rabbi Akiva in a contradiction. "If your God loves the poor," he pressed, "why doesn't He feed them Himself?" Akiva did not he...
One of the most formidable women in the Talmud was Beruriah, wife of Rabbi Meir. She appears mostly in fragments. But in one famous passage she corrects her husband's Hebrew, and i...
Benjamin the Righteous was the keeper of the communal poor-box in his city. He had one job: to guard the coins and give them out to the hungry. In a year of famine a woman came to ...
The Roman emperor Hadrian (may his bones be ground, the rabbis add in a growl) was fond of cornering Jewish sages with theological questions. One day he turned to Rabbi Joshua ben ...
Joseph's brothers had carried their father's coffin up from Egypt to bury him in the Cave of Machpelah. At the mouth of the cave, Esau was waiting. "This grave is mine," Esau said....
For three years the house of Shammai and the house of Hillel stood locked in argument. Each claimed the law, the halacha, belonged to them. Both schools were sharp; both were pious...
One of the stranger teachings in the later Kabbalah concerns gilgul, the transmigration of souls. The Nishmat Chaim of Rabbi Menashe ben Israel, published in Amsterdam in 1651, pre...
The prophet Isaiah once warned Jerusalem and Judah that the Lord of hosts was about to take away the stay and the staff, the whole stay of bread and the whole stay of water, the mi...
The question of how oral tradition becomes binding is an old one, and the Talmud answers it with a scene in Solomon's court. Rav Yehudah, reporting in the name of Shmuel, taught th...
Four tannaim ascended into the Pardes, the orchard of mystical contemplation, and Rabbi Akiva warned his companions before they entered. "When you come to the pavement of pure marb...
Midrash Rabbah on Deuteronomy preserves a strange detail about the fall of the First Temple. When the Babylonian conquerors carried away the holy vessels, they did not carry away t...
Acheer once pressed Rabbi Meir with a hard verse: God also has set the one over against the other (Ecclesiastes 7:14). What did it mean? Rabbi Meir offered the simple answer. The H...
The sages collected sharp observations about who people tend to be and why. Most donkey drivers, they said, are rough with their customers, but most sailors are pious, because anyo...
The last conversation between Moses and Joshua began as a gift and ended as a rebuke. On the day Moses was to enter Paradise, he turned to his closest student and said, "If any dou...
The sages taught that four things cancel an evil decree sealed in Heaven, and they built each proof from Scripture itself. The first is tzedakah, the righteous gift. "Righteousness...
Tractate Rosh Hashanah (folio 16, column 2) teaches that on the Day of Judgment three ledgers are opened and three groups of souls appear before the Holy One, blessed be He. The pe...
Rav Acha taught that before Adam was created, God turned to the ministering angels and consulted with them. "Shall we make man?" He asked. The angels answered honestly: "What good ...
The sages counted two hundred and forty-eight limbs in the human body, the same number, they noted, as the positive commandments of the Torah. A curse, they taught, enters and exit...
The Rabbis of Rosh Hashanah 17a sorted the afterlife into categories. Most of the wicked, those guilty of ordinary sins, the ones who grew coarse through sensuous indulgence rather...
During the war with Amalek, the Israelites were losing whenever Moses's hands grew heavy and fell. Aaron and Hur took a stone and placed it under him so he could sit and raise his ...
For seven days before Yom Kippur, the high priest lived as if rehearsing for a wedding he could not afford to fumble. Oxen, rams, and lambs were paraded past him one by one so that...
When Adam understood that his own transgression had drawn death into every future generation, he did not try to defend himself. He mourned. He fasted for one hundred and thirty yea...
