351 passagesc. 13th century CEHebrew / AramaicCC-BY
Individual passages from Yalkut Shimoni on Nach, shown in source order. Page 1 of 8.
The sages noticed a chilling pattern in Scripture. Whenever the words "and it came to pass after the death" appear, something in the world seems to come undone. After Abraham died,...
The sages reconstructed the final weeks of Moses' life almost like a calendar. In the fortieth year of the wilderness journey, beginning on the first of Shevat, Moses gathered Isra...
When God spoke to Joshua at the start of his leadership, the sages reached for a verse from Proverbs: "He who tends a fig tree shall eat its fruit." Why the fig tree? Because the f...
The sages asked a simple question with a beautiful answer. Of all the fruits, why does Scripture compare the Torah to a fig? Look at the others, they said. A date hides a hard pit ...
The same verse about tending a fig tree, the sages said, can be read as a portrait of David. David poured his whole heart into the dream of building the Temple, praying and laborin...
The image of the faithful fig-tender, the rabbis said, also fits Joshua, the young man who never left the tent of study while Moses lived. He tended the Torah at Moses' side year a...
When Moses sent the twelve scouts into the Land of Israel, he singled out one of them, Hosea son of Nun, and added a Hebrew letter to his name, making him Yehoshua, Joshua. The sag...
A name in the Torah is not a fixed label, the sages taught; it can grow or shrink with a person's deeds. Hosea son of Nun was an ordinary name until its bearer proved himself, and ...
The book of Joshua opens with God's announcement that "Moses My servant is dead," and the sages heard in that single word, servant, a quiet ledger of how heaven measures a life. Th...
When Moses died, Israel did not only lose a leader. According to the sages, the nation lost knowledge. During the days of mourning, three thousand laws simply slipped out of memory...
Before Joshua leads Israel across the Jordan, the sages pause over the river's very name. Why Yarden? Because it descends, yored, flowing down from the territory of Dan, from the c...
God promises Joshua that every place the sole of his foot treads will belong to Israel, and the sages wrestle with what that sweeping grant actually permits. The borders of the Lan...
This short comment lingers on why the Euphrates earns the title "the great river" when, by ordinary measure, it is not the largest waterway in the world. The sages answer that its ...
The sages play with the name of the Euphrates the way water plays with light. Perat, they say, hints at fruitfulness, parah, because its banks make seeds explode into growth, sapli...
God assures Joshua that no man will be able to stand against him, and the sages immediately test the limits of the promise. The verse says "man," but does that mean a lone enemy on...
When God tells Joshua to be "strong and very courageous," the sages refuse to read it as mere battlefield encouragement. They hear a general law of the inner life. Four pursuits, t...
How much Torah must a person hold to keep faith with the verse, "This book of the Torah shall not depart from your mouth" (Joshua 1:8)? The sages turn the question over like a ston...
The promise sounds almost too worldly for a holy book: keep at the study of Torah, and your affairs will flourish. Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi will not let it be dismissed as wishful t...
"Prepare provisions for yourselves," Joshua tells the people on the brink of the Land (Joshua 1:11). But what provisions? They had eaten the manna every morning for forty years and...
When Israel pledged loyalty to Joshua, they declared that any man who rebels against his command should die (Joshua 1:18). A sweeping oath. Could it possibly mean that even a comma...
Joshua's first act after taking command was to send two spies into the Land (Joshua 2:1), and the memory of an earlier scouting mission hung over it. The sages read the verse "the ...
When Joshua told the spies to view the land, and Jericho, a careful reader stumbles. Jericho was part of the land already, so why name it on its own? The sages answer with a rule o...
The verse describing Rahab's rescue of the two spies carries a strange slip of grammar. "And the woman took the two men and hid him" (Joshua 2:4), it says, two men but only one hid...
Rahab's confession to the spies, that no spirit was left in any man of Jericho once they heard what the LORD had done at the sea, sounds like ordinary fear. The sages catch a sharp...
A whisper had crossed the Jordan long before the spies did. The peoples of Canaan had heard how the sea split for a fleeing nation of slaves, and the news loosened every knee. Rabb...
Rahab opens her mouth to the two spies and asks them to swear by the LORD. Rabbi Shimon hears in that small request the beginning of a long indictment, and he turns it into a mirro...
The two spies are told to lie low in the hills for three days until their pursuers give up. The midrash seizes on that number and turns it into a promise that runs through the whol...
The verse says Joshua rose early in the morning, and the midrash will not let the timing pass. In the morning, it stresses, and not at night. Why? Because once the destroying angel...
God commands a gap between the people and the Ark as they cross the Jordan, two thousand cubits of empty ground. The midrash hears more than a marching order in that measurement. J...
Joshua calls the whole nation to come near, and the sages picture something staggering. He gathered all of Israel into the narrow space between the two carrying poles of the Ark. O...
As Israel prepares to cross the Jordan, the Ark goes before them under a striking title: the ark of the covenant of the Lord of all the earth. Rabbi Shmuel bar Nachmani fixes on th...
On the day Israel crossed the Jordan, the ordinary order of the march was overturned. Usually the Ark followed two of the tribal banners; that day it went first, with the priests, ...
Half the nation climbed Mount Gerizim, half climbed Mount Ebal, and in the valley between stood the heart of the people: the Ark at the center, ringed by priests, the priests ringe...
The Torah marks the spot for the blessings and curses with a string of clues - beyond the Jordan, toward the setting sun, in Canaanite country, near Gilgal, by the terebinths of Mo...
When the Jordan parted for Israel, the upstream waters rose in one heap (Joshua 3:16) "far off from Adam" (ba-adam), and the Sages hear in that word more than a place-name. Every g...
When the verse says Israel came up out of the Jordan "on the tenth of the month," Rabbi Levi hears an echo. The tenth is the very day, back in Egypt, when each household took its P...
When the LORD tells Joshua to circumcise Israel "again, a second time," the Sages catch the strange doubling. The men had already been circumcised in Egypt, so what was left to do?...
Four times in Scripture God commands "make for yourself" some object, and Rabbi Ami notices a pattern. Three of them spell out the material: the ark for Noah was cedar, the knives ...
The verse calls the site of Joshua's mass circumcision "the hill of the foreskins," and the plain reading is the blunt one: he gathered so many that they piled into a hill. Rav Nac...
Scripture opens a window onto the rhythm of the covenant: "For everything there is a season, and a time for every purpose" (Ecclesiastes 3:1). The sages read that line not as a com...
When Israel left Egypt, Pharaoh hurled a curse dressed up as a forecast. Peering into the stars, he warned the people, "See that evil is set before your faces." By his reckoning a ...
A single phrase in Joshua sets off a careful legal puzzle. The text reports that Israel "ate of the produce of the land on the day after the Passover" (Joshua 5:11). But the law of...
For forty years the manna fell, and the people came to read it as a gift bound up with the life of Moses. So when Joshua records that "the manna ceased on the day after" (Joshua 5:...
The folk wisdom is blunt. Ask a man why he eats coarse barley bread, and he will tell you it is because there is no wheat. Ask why he chews carobs, and he answers that he has no dr...
How long did the manna outlast the man who prayed it down? The sages do not agree, and the disagreement is itself a kind of homage to Moses, each master measuring the afterglow of ...
Israel in the wilderness was given three faithful shepherds, Moses, Aaron, and Miriam, and through each came a gift that kept the people alive. The manna fell in the merit of Moses...
Joshua stood near Jericho the night before the conquest, and the verse says he was "by Jericho." Yet Scripture also insists the city was sealed shut, gates barred. How could he be ...
When Joshua challenged the stranger, demanding to know whose side he was on, the angel answered with a grievance that rose, as it were, from the very soles of his feet. "Twice now,...
