90 passages in Rabbinic Midrash
Individual passages from Midrash Aggadah, shown in source order. Page 2 of 2.
People were whispering that Isaac was not really Abraham's son. The story behind the gossip was ugly. Sarah had once been taken into the household of Avimelech, and the rumor mill ...
The rabbis do the math, and it is grim. Isaac was forty when he married, but he was thirty-seven when his father bound him on the mountain, and the shock of that day is what killed...
Rebecca could not conceive, so Isaac pleaded with God on her behalf. The Midrash Aggadah asks a strange question about that pleading. Why does Scripture compare the prayer of the r...
The twins fought before they were born, and they fought over which world they wanted. Whenever Rebecca walked past a house of idols, Esau kicked and writhed to get out. Whenever sh...
Rebecca felt the war before either child was born. Two nations were fighting inside her, and she went looking for an answer. The midrash says the answer came through Shem, son of N...
When Scripture says Rebecca carried twins, it spells the word wrong. Or rather, it spells it short. The Hebrew word for twins is missing its alef, written incomplete, as if the tex...
The Torah says the firstborn twin of Rebecca emerged ruddy (Genesis 25:25), and the rabbis of the Midrash Aggadah do not hear a simple note about complexion. They hear a verdict. R...
Twins fought in the womb, and the second one was named for how he fought. Jacob came out gripping his brother's heel, and the Midrash Aggadah says that grip was no accident. Esau h...
Plant a myrtle and a thornbush side by side as seedlings, and no one can tell them apart. Both are just green shoots pushing out of the same dirt. The midrash uses that image for J...
The Torah says Isaac loved Esau because game was in his mouth. The simple reading is a hunter feeding his father the meat he caught. The midrash hears something darker, a con run o...
The day Abraham died, Jacob was stirring a pot of lentils. Not a casual lunch. It was a mourner's meal, cooked for his shattered father Isaac, who had just buried his own father. W...
"Pour that red stuff into me," Esau demands, and the Sages catch how he says it. Open my mouth and tip it in like filling a pot, like loading a camel before a long desert haul. He ...
"I am going to die," Esau said. "What good is the birthright to me?" Most people hear a hungry hunter shrugging off an inheritance. The Midrash Aggadah hears something darker, and ...
Here is a problem the sages of the Midrash Aggadah could not ignore. When Esau sold his birthright for a bowl of lentil stew, the Torah says "Jacob said: swear to me" (Genesis 25:3...
Jacob handed his brother bread and lentil stew, and the rabbis caught the etiquette in it. A merchant who closes a deal does not just take the goods and walk. He feeds the man he t...
The famine that struck the land was not an accident of weather. It came for Isaac specifically. It was a test, aimed at one question. When the crops failed and hunger spread, would...
Famine drives Isaac toward Egypt, the road his father once traveled in time of hunger, and God stops him with a brief command. Stay in the land. Midrash Aggadah on (Genesis 26:2) h...
God praises Abraham for keeping His charge, His commandments, His laws, and His teachings, and the Midrash Aggadah refuses to treat that as flattery. Each word, the rabbis insist, ...
Isaac had come to Gerar carrying his father's old fear. He had called Rebecca his sister rather than his wife, certain that some king would otherwise take her and kill him for her....
Plenty of people left Be'er Sheva that day. Donkeys, camels, a whole caravan moving out. The Torah does not mention a single one of them. It records only one departure: "And Jacob ...
"And he lay down in that place." A small phrase, easy to read past. But the sages press on it. Lay down? Had Jacob not slept a single night until he reached this one particular spo...
The angels on Jacob's ladder were not sightseeing. They were furious, and they came to hurt him. The Sages read the dream from underneath. The ladder is loaded with meanings. Its n...
God stood over the sleeping Jacob at Beth El and promised him "the land that you are lying upon" (Genesis 28:13). The Midrash Aggadah catches the problem instantly. Jacob was stret...
God laid out the borders of the promised land for Jacob as he slept at Beth El: spread out to the west, to the east, to the north and the south (Genesis 28:14). The midrash notices...
Jacob wakes from the dream of the ladder and says four words that ache with regret: "And I did not know." The rabbis lean in close on that line. What is he sorry about? Not the dre...
"How awesome is this place." Jacob wakes from his dream and gasps those words, and the sages hear a prophecy folded inside them. They read his sentence as the whole future of the H...
The Torah says Jacob took "the stone" for his pillow at Beth El, yet the earlier verse describes him gathering several stones from the place (Genesis 28:11). The Sages of Midrash A...
On the run from a brother who wanted him dead, Jacob made his vow to God. "Protect me," he asked, and the Midrash Aggadah hears in that word a plea to be guarded from three specifi...
The Torah says that Jacob "lifted up his feet and went" (Genesis 29:1), and the sages of the Midrash Aggadah stop at the unusual phrasing. Do not a person's feet always carry him? ...
Jacob looks up and sees a well in a field. The rabbis say he was not looking at water at all. He was seeing Sinai, the mountain where the Torah would one day be given, the well the...
It looks like a simple scene at a watering hole. Flocks gathered, a heavy stone over the well, shepherds rolling it back to water their sheep, then sealing it shut again. The sages...
The Midrash Aggadah takes a plain line of travel narrative and turns it into a scene set in the distant future. In the Torah's story Jacob meets shepherds at a well and asks where ...
The Torah says Leah had weak eyes, and the easy reading is that she was simply plain. The Midrash Aggadah tells a story that turns weakness into heartbreak. The whole region had it...
"And God remembered Rachel." The midrash asks what exactly God was remembering when he finally opened her womb, and the answer reaches back to her own wedding night, the one that s...
The daughters of Zelophehad had already won the hardest fight: the right to inherit their father's land when he died with no sons. Now came the catch. The Torah says that for the s...
A place so sacred, it’s said to be constantly under God’s watchful eye. (Deuteronomy 11:12) tells us that God's eyes are always on the Land of Israel. It’s a powerful image, isn’t ...
The Torah says Joseph was brought down to Egypt, and the rabbis hear more than one descent in that single word. Read it one way and Joseph goes down. Read it another way, they say,...
It all starts with a bit of divine disappointment. The tradition says when the generation of the Flood went astray, God, in a moment of regret, wondered about creating humans in th...
Twenty-two years. That is how long Jacob believed his beloved son was dead. Then the wagons arrive, the rumor turns out to be true, and there stands Joseph, alive, a grown man, a r...
A world freshly formed, still finding its shape. In the beginning, the area where Jerusalem now stands wasn't a mountain at all. It was a valley, a simple vale. But God, in His inf...
The notion of a Torah Chadashah, a new Torah, pops up in some fascinating places. It suggests that what we know now isn't the final word. That there's more to the story, more to le...
Midrash Aggadah turns to The Messiah's Yeshivah. And according to tradition, the Messiah will have his own! It won’t just be any learning. The text from Tree of Souls tells us that...
