351 passages in Rabbinic Midrash
Individual passages from Yalkut Shimoni on Nach, shown in source order. Page 2 of 8.
Rabbi Abba bar Pappa narrows Joshua's offense to a single lapse: for one night he caused Israel to set aside the study of Torah. The angel arrives carrying a double charge. "Last e...
God commands Israel to march around Jericho once a day for six days and seven times on the seventh. The sages use this to draw a line in the laws of war. Ordinarily a siege against...
Should anyone challenge you with the question of how Joshua dared profane the Shabbat at Jericho, the sages supply the defense: he acted on God's own order. The command to circle t...
Scripture declares Jericho "devoted," a city placed entirely under the ban. Rabbi Shimon ben Lakish reads the Hebrew word for devoted, cherem, through its numerical value, which to...
At Jericho the people shouted and the priests blew shofars, ordinary rams' horns. The sages notice what is missing: not a word about the magnificent silver trumpets Moses had been ...
The verse says plainly that the wall of Jericho fell. Yet the rabbis teach that one who sees the place of that wall should recite a blessing over a wall that was swallowed into the...
When the two spies came back into the doomed city of Jericho, they did not pull out only Rahab. They brought out her father, her mother, her brothers, and "all her families." The s...
After Jericho fell, Joshua did more than warn against rebuilding it. He bound the words "Cursed be the man" with a force the sages read in three layers at once. The single word for...
"The LORD was with Joshua, and his fame was in all the land." The sages heard in that line a particular kind of renown, the sort that gets minted into currency that passes from han...
When the spies set out toward Ai, the verse locates it "beside Beth-Aven, east of Beth-El." The sages caught the slide. The place had once been called Beth-El, the House of God. No...
The defeat at Ai cost Israel "about thirty-six men." The sages read the vague number as one man so weighty he counted as many: Jair son of Manasseh, reckoned equal to most of the S...
After the rout at Ai, Joshua and the elders fell on their faces and "put dust upon their heads." The sages refused to read that dust as mere mourning. They heard in it a deliberate...
Joshua, stunned by defeat, cries out, "Would that we had stayed content beyond the Jordan!" The sages set that outburst against a verse in Proverbs: "The poor man speaks supplicati...
In his desperation Joshua plays his strongest card. He does not only beg for Israel's survival; he asks, "What will You do for Your great Name?" The sages, through Resh Lakish, exp...
After the defeat at Ai, Joshua threw himself to the ground before the Ark and lay there with his face in the dust, pouring out his grief to the Holy One, blessed be He. To us this ...
"Get up," the Holy One, blessed be He, tells Joshua, and the Rabbis hear rebuke folded inside the command. Rabbi Shila says God charged Joshua with overreach. Rav, after Shila left...
Rabbi Yehoshua opens with a verse from Psalms: "I call to God Most High, to God who fulfills for me." He reads it as a promise that what righteous people resolve below, Heaven will...
The verse declares that Israel "also transgressed My covenant," and the Rabbis pile sin upon sin onto Achan, the man who stole from the ban of Jericho. Rabbi Yehudah, in the name o...
Rabbi Akiva binds two words together: the ban and the oath are one and the same. To violate the one is to violate the other, and the danger reaches even the person who merely knows...
Achan does not go quietly. When Joshua confronts him on the strength of the lots, Achan throws the method back in his face: cast lots if you like, but I will cast lots over you and...
The Rabbis fasten on the word "now" in Joshua's plea, "Give now honor to the LORD," and hear in it a request rather than a command. The exchange between Joshua and Achan turns subt...
Achan's confession includes a telling line: "I saw among the spoil." The Rabbis catch the verb. He did not merely glimpse the loot; he claimed to have seen a license for it in the ...
Achan's loot looked like simple greed, yet the sages heard a whole history of empire inside the phrase "a goodly mantle of Shinar" (Joshua 7:21). Shinar means Babylon, and a Babylo...
Rabbi Elazar drew a sharp lesson from the geography of defeat. Israel was routed at Ai, the very place that sits between Beth-El and Ai on the map. Long before, Abraham had pitched...
The Exilarch pressed Rav Huna with a question that still stings: the verse says Joshua brought up not only Achan but his sons and his daughters along with the stolen silver, mantle...
Resh Lakish noticed a pattern in how Scripture handles a person's family tree. Sometimes a name is given and then dropped, the lineage left in peace. Other times Scripture recites ...
A tender law lies buried in the harshest moment. The rabbis taught that when a condemned man came within about ten cubits of the place of stoning, the court would turn to him and s...
A single verse in Chronicles lists the sons of Zerah and ends with the curious phrase "five of them in all" (1 Chronicles 2:6). The rabbis read it as a promise: all five are bound ...
The verse seems to contradict itself. First it says they stoned him "with stones, him alone," and then it speaks of burning with fire (Joshua 7:25). The phrase "him alone" tells th...
The verse reads, in Hebrew, with a future-tense verb where we expect the past: not "Joshua built an altar" but, more literally, "then Joshua will build" (Joshua 8:30). Rabbi seized...
When Israel crossed into the land, Joshua arranged the people for the great ceremony of blessing and curse, half facing Mount Gerizim and half facing Mount Ebal. The sages noticed ...
When the kings of Canaan heard that Joshua had taken the land, they banded together as one to make war. Rabbi Aibu, teaching in the name of Rabbi Eleazar son of Rabbi Yose the Gali...
The Gibeonites came to Joshua in worn clothes and with moldy bread, claiming to be travelers from a distant land. In their speech they explained that their elders and townsfolk had...
When Joshua discovered that the Gibeonites had tricked Israel into a treaty, he declared, "And now you are cursed." Rabbi Eleazar noticed that these exact words had been spoken onc...
After the Gibeonites' deception came to light, Joshua bound them to perpetual labor, making them hewers of wood and drawers of water for the community and for the altar of God. The...
When the verse introduces the Canaanite ruler who first moved against Joshua, it names him Adoni-Zedek, king of Jerusalem. The sages paused on that name, for the word "zedek" means...
As the Canaanite kings fled down the slope of Beth-Horon, Scripture says God hurled great stones upon them from the sky, and more of the enemy died from the hail than from Israel's...
When the verse says, "Then Joshua spoke," the sages dwelt on that small word "then." Sometimes it opens a window onto the past, as when men first began to call on God's name, or wh...
When Joshua cried out at Gibeon for the sun to halt in its course, the sky obeyed. The sages refused to treat this as a violation of the natural order. Instead they taught that the...
The sages noticed something strange in Joshua's command. He did not tell the sun to stop or to stand. He told it to be quiet. Why? Because, they taught, the sun is never silent. Fr...
The verse that records the great miracle ends with a curious aside: this is written in the Book of Jashar, the Book of the Upright. The sages turned that phrase over and asked who ...
The phrase Book of Jashar invited the sages to guess what lost book Scripture meant. Rabbi Chiyya read it as the book of the patriarchs, the upright ones Balaam longed to die like....
The conquest left most of the captured cities standing on their old mounds, but one city was burned to the ground. Hazor. The text singles it out, and the sages asked why this plac...
Scripture praises Joshua with a quiet phrase: he left nothing undone of all that the LORD commanded Moses. Notice the wording, the sages say. It does not credit him with keeping wh...
When Joshua's conquest is tallied, the Book of Joshua does not list the defeated kings in a plain paragraph. It sets them out one beneath the other, each followed by the word "one,...
Joshua's wars ended with thirty-one defeated kings. Rabbi Shmuel bar Nachmani made a startling connection across the centuries. Every one of those kings, he said, had once sat as a...
The Book of Joshua announces "the five lords of the Philistines," and then, as if the count had slipped, it names a sixth people, the Avvim who dwelt in the open villages. The sage...
Resh Lakish made a startling claim: certain verses of the Torah look so trivial that one might think them fit for the fire, like the books of heretics, dry lists of who lived where...
