335 passages in Modern Compilations & Folklore
Individual passages from Hebraic Literature (1901), shown in source order. Page 6 of 7.
Simeon ben Shetach, president of the Sanhedrin in the first century BCE, had a problem in Ashkelon: eighty witches living together in a cave, working malevolent magic that terroriz...
The month of Elul, in Jewish tradition, is the month of return. The shofar is blown every morning in synagogues around the world, and propitiatory prayers, selichot, are recited tw...
There is a strange debate preserved in tractate Berachot (folio 47, column 2) that asks a question most of us are afraid to ask out loud. Who, exactly, counts as an am ha'aretz, a ...
The rabbis of Pirkei de-Rabbi Eliezer chapter 48 imagined the hand of God as a kind of cosmic instrument, each finger doing its own piece of sacred work. With the little finger, th...
Rabbi Shimon ben Gamliel, quoting Rabbi Yehoshua, said something that should stop us: since the destruction of the Temple, not a single day has passed without a curse (Sotah 48a). ...
Jerusalem was under siege. Day after day, the defenders inside the city lowered a basket of silver over the walls, and the besiegers below filled the basket with a lamb, a kid, or ...
The Psalmist wrote, "He will regard the prayer of the destitute" (Psalms 102:17), and the Kabbalists pressed hard on the verb. Why does it say regard, and not simply hear? Because ...
The Alexandria synagogue, the Talmud remembers, was so large that a cantor had to wave a flag when the congregation was meant to answer Amen, no human voice could carry from pulpit...
The sages of the Talmud taught that the yetzer hara, the evil inclination within every human being, goes by seven different names in Scripture. Each prophet saw a different face of...
The prophet Joel called him "the hidden one," and the sages took the phrase at its full weight. "I will remove far from you the hidden one, and I will drive him into a land barren ...
The Sages had a quiet problem to solve. The Torah insists that on the seventh day God rested from all the work of creation. But the world is full of objects that seem to lie outsid...
A group of philosophers once traveled to Rome and put a question to the elders of the Jewish community there. "If your God takes no pleasure in idolatry," they asked, "why does He ...
A tradition delivered at Sinai remembers the day Og, king of Bashan, nearly crushed the camp of Israel under a single stone. Og stood above the valley and measured the camp with hi...
Jews have always taken dreams seriously. The Talmud devotes pages to their meaning. But not every dream comes with an interpretation, and not every dreamer has a Joseph nearby to d...
On the Feast of Sukkot, the Torah commands Israel to offer seventy bullocks across the seven days (Numbers 29:12–36). Rabbi Eliezer asked the obvious question in Sukkah 55b: sevent...
A man in Jerusalem held a grand banquet. He had a friend named Kamtza and an enemy named Bar Kamtza. He sent his servant to invite Kamtza. The servant, confused by the similar name...
During the Roman siege of Jerusalem in 70 CE, the storehouses had been burned by Jewish zealots to force the city to fight. Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai, walking through the streets a...
When Nero first entered the Holy Land, he did not arrive as a conqueror sure of his victory. He arrived as a diviner uncertain of his fate. He took up his bow and shot an arrow eas...
Kings are remembered in lists, and the sages kept careful accounts. For Hezekiah, they drew up two columns. On one side, the three things they praised him for. First, he dragged th...
After Titus destroyed the Second Temple in 70 CE, the Rabbis tell us, a small insect flew up his nose and lodged in his brain. It ate at him for the rest of his life. The only thin...
The Talmud preserves a strange tradition about how Rome came to be. When Solomon married the daughter of Pharaoh, a politically brilliant match that would one day haunt the house o...
For seven years after the destruction of the First Temple, the Sages say, the nations of the world cultivated their vineyards with no other manure than the blood of Israel. The soi...
Rabbi Yehoshua, the son of Korcha, heard the story from an old man of Jerusalem who had lived through the Babylonian destruction. In the valley below the city, Nebuzaradan, captain...
Gittin 57b tells a story that Jewish liturgy still refuses to round off. Four hundred boys and four hundred girls were once kidnapped from their families by Roman captors. As the s...
Tractate Gittin (folio 57, column 2) preserves one of the most devastating martyrdom stories in all of rabbinic literature, a Jewish mother and her seven sons dragged before a Roma...
A man in the Talmud (Bava Batra 58a) once overheard his wife whispering to their daughter. Of their ten sons, she admitted, only one was truly his. She would not say which. The fat...
Ulla and Rav Chasda were walking together when they came to the gate of the old house of Rav Chana bar Chenelai. Rav Chasda looked up at the crumbling walls, stopped, and let out a...
The sages were debating whether a certain oven, built in sections and joined with sand, could become ritually unclean. Rabbi Eliezer ruled it pure. The majority ruled it impure. He...
A Roman emperor challenged a sage about the verse in Amos (3:8): The lion hath roared, who will not fear? "Where is this excellence?" the emperor scoffed. "A single horseman kills ...
The Rabbis gave practical instructions for living in a town visited by plague. When pestilence walks the streets, do not walk down the middle of the road. The middle is where the a...
When Rome forbade Israel to study Torah on pain of death, Rabbi Akiva went right on teaching it in the open, gathering crowds around him. His friend Pappus ben Yehudah stumbled acr...
Rabbi Akiva had a habit, whenever he taught, of binding the body to the soul. "If we who study Torah suffer," he would say, "how much more would we suffer if we neglected it?" He h...
Before Rabbi Akiva became the greatest sage of his generation, he was an illiterate shepherd in the employ of Calba Savua, one of the wealthiest men in all Jerusalem. He was forty ...
For twelve long years Rabbi Akiva had studied Torah far from home, leaving behind his wife Rachel, who had married him when he was an illiterate shepherd and had believed in him wh...
The Roman-appointed Jewish king Agrippa II, who reigned over parts of Judea in the first century CE, once tried to count the male population of Israel. Because a direct census of I...
Sanhedrin 65b sets the sages debating: what exactly is an enchanter, the figure the Torah forbids? Rabbi Shimon gives the ugliest definition: one who passes the secretions of seven...
The Roman governor Turnus Rufus loved to bait Rabbi Akiva with theological questions. One day he asked, "Why is the Shabbat distinguished from other days?" Akiva answered with a qu...
When blind Isaac reached out to bless his son and said, "HaKol kol Yaakov v'ha-yadayim y'dei Esav", "The voice is the voice of Jacob, but the hands are the hands of Esau" (Genesis ...
Every day three choirs of ministering angels stand before the throne and sing. The first class sings, "Holy!" The second answers, "Holy!" The third completes the line: "Holy is the...
Tractate Shabbat (folio 66, column 2) preserves something most modern readers will find startling: a rabbinic prescription against fever that is half incantation, half midrash. The...
One morning Rabban Yochanan ben Zakkai rode out of Jerusalem with his disciples. On the road, he saw a young woman bent over, picking individual barley grains out of the droppings ...
The plague of frogs rose out of the Nile, and the sages wondered: how does a single verse describe it in the singular? And the frog came up and covered the land of Egypt (Exodus 8:...
A beggar once came to Rava's door asking for a meal. The story is told in tractate Ketubot (folio 67, column 2), and it is really about the difference between charity as surveillan...
A strange episode is preserved in the Talmud: a witch once transformed a man into an ass. He found himself in the marketplace on four legs, mounted like any beast of burden. One of...
Rabbi Eliezer ben Hyrcanus was dying. Around his bed stood his greatest student, Rabbi Akiva, and what Eliezer did with his final breath changed Jewish law forever. He began teachi...
When Solomon needed the king of the demons to help build the Temple without iron, he sent his captain Benaiah son of Jehoiada into the wilderness. Benaiah carried two weapons that ...
The story picks up after Ashmedai, king of the demons, has seized Solomon's magical ring and flung it into the sea. Power stripped, Solomon is no longer Solomon. The demon king hur...
Once Solomon had chained the demon king Ashmedai, he held him captive until the Temple was completed. When the work was done, the king grew curious. "What is your superiority over ...
