62 passagesc. 10th century CEHebrew / AramaicCC0; CC-BY
Individual passages from Tanna DeBei Eliyahu Rabbah, shown in source order. Page 1 of 2.
Adam was not only sent out of Eden. Tanna DeBei Eliyahu Rabbah 1:1 hears something sharper in the Hebrew of (Genesis 3:24). The verb for "drove out" also sounds like the language o...
God knew the ending before the first morning. Tanna DeBei Eliyahu Rabbah 1:2 begins there, with a terrifying mercy: if God collected the first debts of humanity as soon as they cam...
Did you ever think about the exile from Eden as… a divorce? It sounds a little strange, I know. We tend to think of Adam and Eve's expulsion from the Garden as a punishment, a seve...
A king walks out of his palace and sees, heaped against his own door, the refuse his household has carried out. Instead of disgust, he beams. That, the sages say, is how the Holy O...
Shabbat is a map of history. Tanna DeBei Eliyahu Rabbah 2:1 imagines the world as six thousand years of labor followed by a seventh millennium of rest. Two thousand years of emptin...
Jewish tradition has a place for them, a sort of spiritual purification chamber we call Gehenna. But the story doesn't end there, not by a long shot. What's truly fascinating is wh...
David refuses to split his soul into neat pieces. In Tanna DeBei Eliyahu Rabbah 3:1, he says his fear lives inside his joy, his joy lives inside his fear, and love rises above both...
The teacher asks a sharp question. Why did the skin of Moses' face shine in this world with the radiance God reserves for the righteous in the world to come? Not for any private ho...
The midrash imagines the World to Come as a study hall, not an empty sky. In the days of the son of David, and in the world to come, life will be free of pain and free of the evil ...
The world to come is like a vast study house. The Holy One, blessed be He, sits at the head, and the righteous take their places before Him, each face shining in proportion to the ...
"Draw me after you, let us run; the King has brought me into his chambers." The teacher hears in this verse the voice of the assembly of Israel, pulled toward God by a love the pro...
"Wisdom is better than weapons of war." To prove it, the teacher points to Elisha. When a band of Aramean raiders fell into his hands and the king of Israel begged to slaughter the...
The chapter opens with a warning that sounds small and proves enormous. Do not share a table with an idolater. The proof is Hezekiah. When Sennacherib besieged Jerusalem, Hezekiah ...
Jezebel did not enter Ahab's palace as decoration. Tanna DeBei Eliyahu Rabbah 9:1 gives her one sentence, and the sentence is enough to explain a kingdom's collapse. She was the da...
When Deborah sang after her victory, the teacher asks what she was really prophesying. Her answer reframes the whole idea of how Israel is saved. God avenges Israel against its ene...
At a banquet, a gentile priest, loosened by wine, taunts Rabbi Judah the Patriarch: we are kinder than you, since when Joab conquered Edom he wiped out every male and left only the...
A king buys orphaned children and raises them at his own table, feeds them what he eats, builds them houses, and plants them vineyards. Then, the moment their bellies are full, the...
Israel is one ship. That is the whole image, and the midrash lets it cut. If one compartment of a ship is torn open, nobody says, "Only one compartment was torn." The ship was torn...
Choose your table carefully, the chapter begins. Sit with people of learning, not with those careless about the law, because the company you keep at a meal seeps into who you becom...
Beware of laughter, the chapter warns, and then proves how dangerous the word is. Scripture uses the same Hebrew root for mockery, idolatry, bloodshed, and scoffing. Lightheadednes...
The chapter opens with a hard truth: craving a comfortable life in this world is a bad sign. It tells of a king who invites his servant to a long banquet and promises a gift. Halfw...
The prophet Elijah recounts a meeting on the road. A man who knew Scripture but had never studied Mishnah stopped him, nervous, afraid the question might give offense. Elijah set h...
A second man approaches the prophet Elijah, again one who knows Scripture but not the Oral Law, and presses him with a string of challenges: handwashing, slaughter at the throat, h...
A widow wanders from door to door in grief, asking the same unanswerable question: her husband read deeply, studied tirelessly, served the sages faithfully, so why did he die in th...
In the great study hall of Jerusalem, a student approaches the prophet Elijah like a son before his father and asks why the earliest generations lived so astonishingly long. The an...
Tanna deBei Eliyahu opens the praise of Moses around a single verse of Psalms: clean hands, a pure heart, a soul that never made a false claim, a tongue that never swore to deceive...
The chapter begins with Lamentations: rise in the night, pour out your heart like water, lift your hands for your starving children. Out of that grief the teacher draws a startling...
A hidden priest anchors this teaching. He kept his good deeds out of sight, and with ten children he prayed every day, even pressing his face to the dust, that none of them would e...
The teaching reads Ezekiel's vision of a stream flowing from the sanctuary as a portrait of those who honor Torah daily. Picture ten Jewish households in a city surrounded by hosti...
The teacher tells a story against himself. Walking through a drought-stricken region, he meets a man who offers him a home stocked with wheat, barley, and legumes if he will only s...
This reading turns the night-cry of Lamentations into three different songs. First it becomes the prayer that rises out of suffering. When troubles come, get up at midnight and ble...
The chapter opens with the rabbis arguing over Elijah's lineage: is the prophet descended from Rachel or from Leah? Elijah himself, speaking in the first person as the teacher of t...
A traveler stops the teacher with a hard question: why does God hold back children from devoted Jewish households? The man has a cynical theory, that such men carry rancor and marr...
Eliyahu tells how he once passed through a city of Israel and found two hundred young men learning Torah from a single teacher. A year later they were gone, the teacher and his who...
Be pleasant in how you live, devout in how you sit, careful in the fear of Heaven, and a maker of peace with parents and teachers and every person you meet. A soft answer turns awa...
Eliyahu keeps turning the verse "Pour out your heart like water." Water is a ritual bath that purifies, and so is Torah. Repentance and Torah can cleanse even idolatry from a perso...
Eliyahu turns to God in open prayer. Look at our affliction, he pleads, and remember the householders of Israel who have no income yet study Torah every day, the poor whose very fl...
Eliyahu reads the verse from Lamentations about children fainting with hunger and draws a lesson about guarding the household. Scripture calls the whole people to gather, men, wome...
Eliyahu recalls an old man who once stopped him on the road and asked why God split the world among rival nations and kingdoms. The answer, he says, is to guard Israel. God watches...
Eliyahu reads the cry of Lamentations again and teaches that a person should plead for mercy over his whole household, and that the "streets" where children faint are really the sy...
Eliyahu reads the verse about those who faint with hunger and tells of the moment Moses came down from Sinai. Seeing how the people had defiled themselves, he looked at the tablets...
A king arrives at a frightened town with horses and armies. His servants tremble. But this king is wise. Instead of overwhelming them, he settles nearby and orders grain and clothi...
The sage opens the laws of women with a fierce defense of dignity. A Hebrew maidservant, he insists, must never be ordered about like a foreign slave woman, told to take coins and ...
An old man stops the sage on the road with a sharp challenge. Surely our generation is greater than the one that left Egypt. We have Torah, Prophets, and Writings, while Moses' peo...
The chapter sets two lineages against each other. The children of Jacob, who came out of Egypt, held to one shining commandment, binding themselves in kindness, circumcision, and l...
God spoke at Sinai in two voices at once. Tanna DeBei Eliyahu Rabbah 25:1 notices that the Ten Commandments begin with public thunder, but the words move between plural and singula...
God makes the demand shockingly small. Tanna DeBei Eliyahu Rabbah 26:1 does not open with sacrifices, pilgrimages, secrets, or heroic suffering. God turns to Israel and says: My ch...
A person might reason that since God comes first, the honor and reverence owed to parents can be set aside. The chapter shuts that door immediately. Scripture commands honor of God...
