360 passages in Rabbinic Midrash
Individual passages from Mekhilta DeRabbi Shimon Ben Yochai, shown in source order. Page 2 of 8.
The Torah names two outsiders who are barred from the Passover lamb: the resident worker and the hired worker. The sages press the wording. Why list both, when logic alone seems en...
The Passover lamb must be eaten in one house, and the sages turn that into a portrait of one company sharing one meal. Even the household attendant has his place. If he is clever, ...
When the Torah says the whole congregation of Israel shall offer the Passover, the sages hear a crowd large enough that it cannot all crush forward at once. An earlier verse piles ...
A stranger who joins Israel does not drift in by accident. Intention shapes everything. When an Israelite immerses a gentile in water for the sake of conversion, that person become...
One law for the native and the stranger, says the Torah, and the sages read the equation in both directions. The native-born Israelite is defined here as one who has taken the whol...
A single line closes the account of that night: all the children of Israel did so. It looks like a mere report that the commands were carried out. The sages hear more. They link it...
The verse marks the moment of the going-out with a strange word. On the etzem of that day, it says, a term that elsewhere means a bone. The sages read it as the strength, the very ...
God tells Moses to sanctify the firstborn, and the sages first ask what sanctify even means here. It means to set apart. But a worry follows: does the firstborn's holiness depend o...
Moses turns to a people still tasting freedom on their tongues and gives them a command that will outlast their lifetimes. Remember this day. Not as a private memory that fades, bu...
The departure is dated with care: the month of spring, the season that is fit, neither scorching nor freezing. God does not redeem His people in the cruel heat of summer or the bit...
The promise of the land arrives wrapped in a command. First do this service, and as its reward you will be brought in. The rabbis catch a tender instruction in the word "to give to...
A single verse about bread becomes a teaching about second chances. For seven days the people are to eat matzah, and the seventh day is marked as a festival to the LORD. The rabbis...
The law against owning leaven on Passover looks absolute, yet the rabbis read its repeated phrasing as a set of careful boundaries. "No leaven shall be seen by you" means yours, no...
The duty to tell the story returns, and again the rabbis insist there is no escaping it. Whether a man has a son or sits alone, whether he is in company or by himself, he must tell...
A single verse, "and it shall be a sign for you," becomes a workshop where the rabbis hammer out the shape of tefillin. The sign is yours, an inward mark, not a knot worn for show ...
The command to keep this statute carries a quiet measure of who is ready to keep it. A child is not yet bound, the rabbis say, until he can guard his tefillin properly. The moment ...
The verse opens with a word that the Sages heard as a drumbeat of urgency. "And it shall be when the LORD brings you to the land" carries no delay in it. The moment is now. The com...
The Sages noticed that the dedication of the firstborn is commanded not once but in three settings, and they read the repetition as three distinct moments in the nation's story. In...
The Torah singles out the donkey among all the work-beasts whose firstborn must be redeemed, and the Sages held the line tightly. Only a donkey born to a donkey falls under the law...
The verse imagines a day when a child turns and asks his parent what all of this means, and the Sages drew two quiet lessons from the way it is phrased. First, listen closely to th...
The Sages turned to a single phrase, "when Pharaoh stubbornly refused to let us go," and found in it the long, strange story of a heart that would not yield. They trace it across t...
From a single verse the Sages drew the practical choreography of laying tefillin. The hand-tefillin and the head-tefillin are each a commandment in its own right, and so they do no...
Why did God lead Israel out of Egypt by the long desert road rather than the short coastal path? The Sages pour answer after answer into the gap. First they soften the word for Pha...
The verse says God led the people around, and the Sages picture Him setting Israel in a place hemmed on every side, where they could turn neither forward nor back, wholly in His ha...
While every other Israelite was filling their arms with Egyptian gold on the night of liberation, one man went looking for a coffin. Moses understood that freedom without a promise...
The Torah says Israel set out from a place called Succoth, which means "booths" or "shelters." But Rabbi Akiva heard something deeper in that name. The shelter that protected Israe...
A single pillar of cloud is mentioned in the verse, but the sages counted seven. By gathering every place Scripture names a cloud accompanying Israel, they found a complete escort:...
The two pillars never overlapped and never left a gap. Before the cloud of daytime faded, the fire of night was already glowing into place; before the fire dimmed, the cloud was sh...
How can you tell whether a command God gave Moses was meant only for that hour or meant to bind Israel forever? Rabbi Shimon ben Yochai found the signal hidden in the grammar. When...
God told Israel to double back and camp at a place called Pi-Hahiroth, and the rabbis read the name as a confession. This had been a center of Egyptian idol worship, a sanctuary wh...
From his palace, Pharaoh sneered that the Israelites were lost, confounded, hopelessly tangled up in the land with the wilderness closing around them. He meant it as mockery. The r...
God split Pharaoh's resolve so he could not decide whether to chase Israel or let them go, and then hardened him toward pursuit so that the sea could become the stage for God's glo...
The midrash reconstructs the days of the journey out of Egypt and finds a hidden episode behind the verse. Israel had been let go for what the Egyptians understood as a three-day f...
A king does not lift a finger for himself. Servants saddle his mount and ready his chariot while he waits. Yet here Pharaoh harnessed his own chariot with his own hands, so eager w...
Where did Pharaoh suddenly find six hundred war chariots and their horses? The plague of pestilence had killed all the cattle of Egypt, and Israel's own animals went out with them....
The verse says God strengthened Pharaoh's heart so that he pursued, and the midrash explains why such strengthening was needed at all. Pharaoh's heart was split down the middle, to...
The Egyptian army ran a long, hard pursuit, and the midrash notices something curious: not one soldier so much as tripped along the way. This was no accident. The nations of the wo...
The midrash turns "Pharaoh drew near" into something more than geography. He drew his own punishment near, hurrying toward the doom waiting at the sea. The sages map the timeline: ...
At the edge of the sea, with the army of Egypt at their backs, the people turned on Moses with bitter words. The midrash hears in their complaint an old grievance finally boiling o...
"Fear not," Moses told the people, and the midrash hears in those two words the measure of his greatness. He stood before thousands upon thousands of terrified men and women and ca...
When Israel was trapped between Pharaoh's chariots and the water, panic split them into four camps, each with its own plan. One group wanted to drown themselves rather than be capt...
At the edge of the sea Moses prayed, and God cut him off with a question that sounds almost like a rebuke: why are you crying out to Me? Speak to Israel and tell them to move forwa...
The parting of the sea was not one wonder but many layered together, and the sages count ten. The water first split open, then arched overhead into a vaulted dome, then divided int...
This brief comment turns the reader back to an earlier teaching rather than opening a new one. When God declares, "And I, behold, I will harden the heart of Egypt" (Exodus 14:17), ...
When the angel of God moved from before Israel's camp to behind it, Rabbi Judah hears the love of a father shielding his child on a dangerous road. Picture a man walking through th...
The same pillar that came between the two camps did opposite work on each side. To Egypt it gave darkness; to Israel it gave a sheltering cloud and light. The sages note a hard tru...
When Moses stood at the shore and commanded the sea to part, the water refused. The midrash imagines an argument. Moses spoke in God's name; the sea would not listen. He showed the...
Who dared to enter the sea before it had fully parted? The sages preserve two answers and refuse to flatten them. In Rabbi Meir's telling, the whole tribe of Benjamin leapt in firs...
