1,517 passages in Rabbinic Midrash
Individual passages from Mekhilta DeRabbi Yishmael, shown in source order. Page 15 of 32.
This dramatic scene from the Mekhilta DeRabbi Yishmael belongs to the section on the splitting of the Sea of Reeds, expounding the Song at the Sea. R. Yossi HaGlili imagines that a...
R. Elazar Hamodai describes the parting of Moses and his father-in-law Yithro, insisting that Moses sent him off with all the honor in the world. The proof lies in Moses' own plea ...
The Mekhilta DeRabbi Yishmael tackles a puzzling question about the Ten Commandments. If all ten were spoken individually, why does the Torah present them as a unified declaration ...
The Mekhilta now draws the ultimate conclusion from the legal hierarchy it has been constructing. Murder overrides the sacrificial service. This is established. But saving a life o...
One might think that Yitro, the father-in-law of Moses, only intended to depart and rejoin his own people but never actually carried it out. To prove that he and his descendants di...
The Mekhilta examines the small word "saying" (lemor) in the account of the covenant at Sinai, when the people answer the terms God sets before them through Moses. The first readin...
The Mekhilta of Rabbi Yishmael, in its tractate on Amalek, traces the honored lineage of a family of scribes back to the wilderness generation. Having noted that when a great maste...
The Torah contains a dramatic command about a murderer who has taken refuge at the altar: "From My very altar shall you take him to die" (Exodus 21:14). Even the holiest place in t...
The Mekhilta preserves a remarkable story about the descendants of Rechav, also known as the Rechabites, a family that had taken a perpetual vow to drink only water, never wine, an...
R. Nathan made a bold comparison between two of the most important covenants in Jewish history. And declared that the covenant with an obscure desert clan was greater than the cove...
Three things were given conditionally: Eretz Yisrael, the Temple, and the kingdom of the house of David, but not the Torah scroll and the covenant of Aaron, which were not given co...
The Mekhilta extends its analysis of conditional versus unconditional covenants to two more foundational gifts: the Torah scroll and the priesthood of Aaron. Whence is it derived t...
Whence is it derived that the sons of Yonadav the son of Rechav are the descendants of Yithro? From (I Chronicles 2:55) "They were the Kenites, who descended from Chamath the fathe...
The passage of the Mekhilta turns on two verses from Proverbs that at first seem to say the same thing, yet are read to mean opposite outcomes. The first is (Proverbs 29:13), "The ...
R. Yehudah Hanassi, the redactor of the Mishnah known simply as Rebbi, reads the prayer of Yaavetz as a model of how a person should petition the Holy One Blessed be He. The verse ...
(Exodus 12:6) "And it shall be to you for a keeping": Why does the taking of the Pesach (Passover) precede its slaughtering by four days? R. Matia b. Charash says: It is written (E...
"And you, raise your staff": Ten miracles were performed for Israel at the sea: The waters were split and became like a dome, viz. (Habakkuk 3:14) "You split (the sea) for his trib...
The Song of the Sea declares: "The depths covered them" (Exodus 15:5). The Mekhilta asks an obvious but brilliant question: are there really depths at the bottom of the sea? The Is...
(Exodus 16:16) "This is the thing that the L-rd has commanded. Gather of it, each man, etc." Here the Mekhilta draws out the hidden miracle inside the daily gathering of the manna....
The Mekhilta DeRabbi Yishmael asks a deceptively simple question: why were the Ten Commandments not placed at the very beginning of the Torah? If they are the foundation of the cov...
The Torah declares: "And if one strikes his father and his mother, he shall be put to death" (Exodus 21:15). The Mekhilta explains why this verse is necessary when the Torah alread...
(Exodus 23:19) commands: "The first of the first-fruits of your land you shall bring to the house of the Lord your God." The Mekhilta asks what this verse adds to (Deuteronomy 26:2...
Rabbi Eliezer Hakappar Berebbi posed a rhetorical question that reveals something extraordinary about the Israelites during their centuries of slavery in Egypt. Did Israel not poss...
When the Israelites stood trapped between the sea ahead and Pharaoh's army behind, a single verse describes the moment the divine rescue began (Exodus 14:19): "And the angel of God...
The passage from the Mekhilta dwells on the fate of the Egyptians at the sea, picturing how the waters that overwhelmed them blotted out the heavens above. The image is of the sea ...
Moses gave the Israelites a simple instruction in (Exodus 16:19): do not leave any manna over until morning. What happened next exposed a fault line running through the entire nati...
Before God ever asked Israel to accept His kingship, He proved Himself through action. The Mekhilta lays out the sequence with deliberate precision, and the order matters. First, G...
"And if one strikes his father and his mother": This tells me only of (one who strikes both) his father and his mother. Whence do I derive (liability for one who strikes) his fathe...
The Mekhilta makes a striking claim about the moral character of the Israelites in Egypt: they were not guilty of sexual immorality. The proof comes from an unexpected source, a ve...
An analogy: A man was walking on the road leading his son before him when robbers came to snare him, whereupon he took him and placed him behind him, when a wolf came to snatch him...
The Mekhilta draws a striking comparison between the experience of the prophet Jonah in the belly of the great fish and the fate of the Egyptian army at the Red Sea. And the Egypti...
Rebbi says: (The thrust of "your [singular] G–d") is to apprise us of the eminence of Israel, that when they all stood at Mount Sinai to receive the Torah, they were all of one hea...
"The first-fruits of your land", the Mekhilta uses this phrase to identify who is excluded from the obligation to bring first-fruits. The key word is "your", your land. Only those ...
Rabbi Nathan offered a striking interpretation of the erotic poetry of Song of Songs that transformed it into a lesson about the sanctity of marriage. When the verse says "a locked...
R. Nathan brings a textual puzzle to R. Shimon b. Yochai about the divine name attached to the angel at the sea. Throughout the Torah, the messenger is called the angel of the L-rd...
The Mekhilta asks another of its characteristically sharp questions about the Red Sea crossing. The verse says the Egyptians "descended into the metzulot", the whirlpools or churni...
The Torah describes how the Israelites gathered manna each morning in the wilderness with a doubled expression: "baboker, baboker," literally "morning, morning" (Exodus 16:21). The...
"I am the L–rd your G–d who took you out of the land of Egypt." What is the intent of this? Because He appeared at the Red Sea as a hero waging war, viz. (Exodus 15:3) "The L–rd is...
Rabbi Yitzchak addresses a grammatical question in the verse about striking one's parents that has enormous legal consequences. The Torah states: "And if one strikes his father and...
The Israelites spent twelve months in Egypt after Moses first appeared before Pharaoh. Twelve months of escalating plagues, mounting chaos, and growing anticipation of departure. D...
(Exodus 14:20) "And it (the cloud) came between the camp of Egypt and the camp of Israel, and it was cloud and darkness", cloud for Israel and darkness for Egypt; Israel in the lig...
The Mekhilta DeRabbi Yishmael states a foundational principle of divine justice: "As one metes it out, so is it meted out to him." God's punishments are not random. They mirror the...
The Mekhilta DeRabbi Yishmael tackled a precise question about the manna's daily lifecycle. (Exodus 16:21) states that "when the sun was hot, it melted." But what time of day does ...
Rabbi Nathan presents this teaching from the Mekhilta DeRabbi Yishmael as a direct rebuttal to heretics who claim there are two divine powers. The argument is elegant in its simpli...
The Mekhilta clarifies the gravity of the law against striking a parent. Scripture decrees death for one who "strikes his father or his mother," and the rabbis ask what kind of blo...
One of the most remarkable claims in rabbinic tradition is that the Israelites preserved their identity throughout centuries of Egyptian bondage by refusing to change their names. ...
The verse (Exodus 14:20) says of the night before the sea split, "And one did not come near another the entire night." The Mekhilta offers two readings of this strange stillness. I...
When the manna melted each morning under the desert sun, it did not simply evaporate. According to the Mekhilta DeRabbi Yishmael, the melted manna formed streams that flowed all th...
