360 passages in Rabbinic Midrash
Individual passages from Mekhilta DeRabbi Shimon Ben Yochai, shown in source order. Page 6 of 8.
If God created the world with a mere word, as the Psalm says, why does the Torah insist He labored six days? The sages refuse to read it as literal exertion. The phrasing exists to...
Six words in Hebrew carry the weight of half the moral order: do not murder, do not commit adultery, do not steal, do not bear false witness. The Mekhilta refuses to let any of the...
The Decalogue does not stop at theft; it reaches inward to the wish itself. The Mekhilta separates two motions of the soul. Desire lives in the heart, but coveting lives in the dee...
One verse says that all the people "saw" the thunder, and the sages read it as a roster of healing. Whoever stood at the mountain stood whole. If everyone saw, then there were no b...
At the foot of the mountain the people make a request that turns out to shape all of Jewish history. They tell Moses, "You speak with us, and we will listen, but let not God speak ...
The people are shaking, and Moses steadies them with an unexpected word: do not be afraid. The whole terrifying display was a test meant to lift them up, not to break them down. Th...
While the people held back at a distance, staggered twelve mil backward and drawn twelve mil forward with every word, Moses walked forward. The verse says he "drew near to the thic...
God tells Moses, "Thus you shall say to the children of Israel," and the sages weigh the single word "thus" until it yields a whole code of transmission. Moses was to teach in the ...
The verse warns, "you shall not make gods of silver or gods of gold alongside Me," and the sages ask the obvious question: hasn't the Torah already banned graven images and every l...
The Torah's first instruction about worship is almost startling in its plainness. Before anything ornate, God says: make Me an altar of earth, joined to the ground itself. The sage...
The Torah forbids any iron tool from shaping the stones of the altar. No saw, no chisel, no blade. The stones must come whole, dug from virgin ground or lifted from a riverbed, unt...
God forbids steps leading up to the altar. Instead, a long ramp slopes gently from the ground to the top. The reason given is modesty: a priest climbing steps would have to stride ...
The portion of civil law opens with a small word that the sages refuse to skip: "And these." Rabbi Yishmael teaches a rule of reading. When Scripture says simply "these," it breaks...
Why does the Torah follow the lofty laws of Sinai with the lowly case of a Hebrew servant? The mystically minded sages give a haunting answer. When Moses received the commandments,...
The Torah draws a careful line around the Hebrew servant's freedom. If he came in alone, he leaves alone. If he came in married, his wife goes out with him. But the sages insist th...
This law has long unsettled readers, and the sages do not soften its hard edges; they map them precisely. If a master gives his Hebrew servant a wife, the Torah means a Canaanite b...
The law of the pierced ear hinges on a single condition: love. A servant whose six years are ending may choose to stay, but only by declaring it plainly, and the sages require him ...
The Torah gives the Hebrew slave a way out after six years. But what about the man who refuses freedom, who loves his master and declares that he will not go free? The Torah marks ...
The law allows a desperate father to sell his young daughter into service. The sages do not soften the difficulty; they hedge it with limits until it nearly disappears. First they ...
The verse imagines a master who took a Hebrew maidservant intending to marry her but who has not yet done so. The Torah calls his failure by a sharp word: he has dealt deceitfully ...
A master may keep a maidservant for himself or pass the chance of marriage to his son. The Torah says he may designate her for his son and the sages immediately ask: is this a comm...
Suppose a master designated his maidservant as a wife and then took a second wife. Does the first lose her standing? The Torah answers with three words that became the backbone of ...
The Torah closes the maidservant's case with a release. If these three things are not done for her, she goes out free, without money. But which three? Rabbi Eliezer says the verse ...
The verse seems to speak only of a man who strikes a man, but the sages refuse to let the law shrink to that single picture. Cross-reading with Leviticus, they widen it in every di...
The Torah turns to the man who kills without intent, who never lay in wait, who simply let an object fall. He is not a murderer, and the sages stress that his case was singled out ...
The Torah draws a sharp line through a single word. "Presumptuously" does not mean carelessness or sudden rage; it means cold deliberation, a killing planned in the heart. The same...
Few sins horrify the Torah more than a child raising a hand against a parent. Yet the law is built with great precision, not blind fury. Scripture says "his father" and "his mother...
The kidnapper in the Torah is no petty thief. He steals a human being and sells that person into slavery, and for this the law sets the death penalty. Reading across from a paralle...
Here the Torah turns from the hand to the tongue, and reveals a surprising hierarchy. A child who strikes a parent is liable only if a real wound is made, and the sentence is stran...
"And if men quarrel" the verse begins, and the sages stop to make a hard observation: nothing good ever comes out of a quarrel. They point to Lot, who was pried away from Abraham, ...
When a quarrel ends in injury and the victim recovers enough to walk outside on his own strength, the verse says the attacker "shall be cleared." Cleared of what? Not of everything...
This law confronts an uncomfortable reality of the ancient world: a master who beats his own slave to death. The Torah does not look away. The sages first establish whose case this...
The previous verse condemned a master who kills his slave, but this verse carves out a hard limit. If the struck slave survives "a day or two days" and only then dies, the master "...
Two men come to blows. Fists fly, the air fills with shouting, and in the chaos a pregnant woman standing nearby is struck and loses the child she carries. Neither man aimed at her...
The verse says "life for life," and the sages ask a precise and disturbing question. Suppose a single act causes two harms at once: a person is killed and an animal is killed, or o...
Few verses have been more misread than "eye for eye." Taken at the surface, it sounds like a command to maim. The sages of the Mekhilta read it as the Torah always meant it to be r...
"A burn for a burn." If the Torah had already covered wounds, why add a burn? The sages answer that a burn can be inflicted without any open wound at all. Picture someone pressed w...
The Torah turns to the household, and to a master's power over the one who serves him. If a man strikes his Canaanite slave in the eye and destroys it, the slave walks out free. Th...
The Torah pairs the slave's tooth with the slave's eye, and the sages mine the pairing for a whole doctrine of dignity. A tooth must be truly knocked out, struck to the ground, or ...
An ox gores a person to death. The Torah orders the animal stoned, and the sages work out exactly which cases the law catches. An ox forced to fight in an arena does not count, bec...
A first goring is treated as a fluke. A repeat is treated as negligence. The Torah turns to the ox that has gored before, and the sages reconstruct the precise machinery of warning...
An ox known to gore has killed a person. Its owner has been warned again and again, yet he failed to guard the animal. The Torah does not hand him over to death. Instead it lays a ...
The verse already said an ox that kills a man or a woman is judged for death. So why add that it also kills a son or a daughter? The sages answer that the Torah is closing a door t...
An ox gores a slave to death, and the Torah names a precise sum: thirty shekels of silver paid to the master. The sages take that number apart coin by coin so that no one can shave...
A man digs a pit in a public place, or opens an existing one, and walks away leaving it uncovered. An ox or a donkey wanders by, falls in, and dies. The Torah holds the digger resp...
When an animal dies in someone's pit, the Torah does not simply transfer one beast's worth from pocket to pocket. It works out a careful accounting that protects the victim without...
Two oxen, two owners, and one of the animals lies dead in the field. The Torah's remedy is neither full compensation nor nothing at all. The living ox is sold, and both men split t...
An ox that has gored becomes a different legal creature, and the Torah marks the moment it crosses over. The animal is not "forewarned" after one bad day or even three scattered in...
