351 passages in Rabbinic Midrash
Individual passages from Yalkut Shimoni on Nach, shown in source order. Page 4 of 8.
One man, seven names. The rabbis treated each name of Moses' father-in-law as a clue to who he became, reading the Hebrew letters like a record of a life turning toward God. He was...
The sages were not finished mining Jethro's names. They offered a second reading of Putiel that does not flatter his past at all. They heard in it the word for fattening, and they ...
When Israel divided the land, they set aside the lushest plot of all, the rich ground of Jericho, five hundred cubits square. The rule was simple: whoever ended up with the Temple ...
Israel's spies stood outside a Canaanite city and stopped a man walking out. Show us the way in, they said, and we will deal kindly with you. He did, and they kept their word: when...
Why was the deathless city named Luz, the word for an almond or hazelnut? The sages turned the name over and found several answers, each one a different way of seeing the place. Ra...
When the land was divided, Zebulun looked at his inheritance and was not pleased. His brothers received fields and vineyards, fertile ground that paid out in grain and wine. He got...
A single Hebrew word, malach, means both "angel" and "messenger," and the sages press on that double meaning when they read that an angel of the LORD came up from Gilgal to Bochim ...
Why would God deliberately leave hostile nations in the Promised Land instead of clearing them all away? The sages answer with a parable about a king and his vineyard. The vineyard...
Why are the nations left to "test" Israel a sign of God's favor and not His cruelty? The sages link the testing to a verse in Psalms: "You have given a banner to those who fear You...
The sages had a habit of collapsing villains of different eras into a single recurring figure, and here they do it with the oppressor named Cushan-Rishathaim. By their reading he i...
The sages offer a second accounting of the name Rishathaim, whose Hebrew form means "two wickednesses." In the first reading the two crimes were spread across generations. Here the...
The book of Judges credits Othniel son of Kenaz with bringing Israel forty years of rest, and the sages do the arithmetic. From those forty years one must subtract the eight years ...
The book of Judges turns again and again on a single tragic refrain, and here the sages mark it: the children of Israel once more did evil in the eyes of the LORD and served the Ba...
Why does Scripture say both that Israel "forsook the LORD" and that they "did not serve Him"? The first phrase already tells us they stopped serving God, so the second seems redund...
When Eglon king of Moab marched against Israel, gathering Ammon and Amalek to take the City of Palms, the sages saw more than a military campaign. They saw a debt betrayed. For Lot...
Scripture says Ehud forged a sword with two edges, the Hebrew calling it a sword of two mouths. The sages would not let the phrase pass as mere weaponry. A blade with two mouths, t...
Ehud the judge came to Eglon king of Moab with a secret. "I have a word of God for you," he said, and the corpulent tyrant did something no one expected. He rose from his throne. I...
The sages were keepers of time as much as keepers of stories, and here they sit down to balance the ledger of Israel's judges. Ehud son of Gera, they record, held Israel steady for...
The sages drew up a roll call of leaders. Othniel from Judah, Ehud from Benjamin, Deborah from Ephraim, Gideon from Manasseh, Tola from Issachar, Jephthah from Gilead, Samson from ...
Scripture says that Jabin king of Canaan oppressed Israel mightily, with strength, for twenty years. The sages heard in that word more than the weight of his nine hundred iron char...
The Yalkut Shimoni, a vast collection of rabbinic commentary and interpretations, grapples with this very question as it explores the story of Devorah, the prophetess and judge. Th...
When the verse names Deborah a prophetess, the sages did not let her stand alone. They set her in a line of women through whom the holy spirit spoke to Israel, gathering the names ...
Rabbi Berekhiah offered a sharp little saying built on four cries of woe, three drawn from the way of all flesh and one aimed at his own subject. Woe to the living, he said, for he...
Before she ever judged Israel under her palm tree, Deborah served the Sanctuary in a humbler way. The sages read her title, "wife of Lappidoth," as a hint that she made the wicks f...
Sometimes, it springs from the most unexpected places. Take the story of Deborah, the prophetess and judge in the Book of Judges. The familiar version gives us she led Israel to vi...
Why did Deborah call for Barak of all men? The sages answer that Barak had spent his whole life in quiet service. He waited on the elders during Joshua's days, and he kept waiting ...
When Deborah told Barak that the LORD had "commanded" him to march on Tabor, a careful reader stops and asks: commanded where? No verse in the Torah says Barak's name. The sages an...
Some men are made smaller by the very thing they hoped would make them great. Rabbi Reuven names two who were meant to lead but stepped behind a woman, and so were measured as seco...
The rabbis loved to find the proverbs of the marketplace already hidden in Scripture. Here they take a common saying of working people, the kind two porters might trade while hoist...
To feel the size of Israel's deliverance, the sages first build up the terror of the enemy. Sisera was no mere general. He came with forty thousand commanders, and behind each comm...
Three people in Scripture stood at the edge of forbidden desire and turned away, and the sages say God honored each of them by stitching a letter of His own name into theirs. Josep...
When Jael opened a skin of milk to give the thirsty Sisera, the sages pause on that ordinary detail and turn it into a doorway to law. The verse, they say, anchors a teaching about...
The rabbis count Deborah's victory hymn among the great songs of Israel, and they ask a simple question about timing. Sisera's army fell, and Deborah and Barak burst into song "on ...
One verse of Deborah's song becomes a window onto the power of communal prayer. "When men let grow their hair in Israel, when the people offered themselves willingly" (Judges 5:2) ...
Deborah opens with a doubled "I" — "I, to the LORD, I will sing" (Judges 5:3) — and the midrash hears in that doubling a memory of the mountains. When God came down to give the Tor...
Deborah's song says that when God marched forth, "the clouds also dropped water" (Judges 5:4), and the rabbis catch a hint of Sinai in that downpour. They teach that the Torah was ...
Standing at Sinai was no gentle experience. According to Rabbi Judah son of Rabbi Ilai, the fire of revelation poured down from above with such intensity that the people below were...
When God spoke the first commandment, "I am the LORD your God," the shock ran through all creation. Deborah sang that the mountains quaked before the LORD, and the midrash widens t...
Rabbi Samuel bar Nachmani traveled up from Babylon carrying three difficult questions, and he found Rabbi Yochanan and put them to him. The first was about a line in Deborah's song...
Rabbi Judah, citing Rav, lays down a hard spiritual law: arrogance hollows out the very gift a person prides himself on. If a prophet grows haughty, his prophecy leaves him; if a s...
The verse pictures riders on white donkeys, and the rabbis hear in it a portrait of the wandering scholar. The disciples of the sages do not stay put. They move from city to city, ...
The rabbis keep mining the Song of Deborah for the quiet heroes of Israel. "White donkeys" now means more than a color. It means riders clean of robbery, scholars whose hands are h...
The verse asks a strange, almost rhetorical question: was a shield or a spear even to be seen among the forty thousand of Israel? On the surface it sounds like a complaint, an army...
Rabbi Oshaya offers a startling reading of exile. The scattering of Israel among the nations, he says, was not only punishment. It was an act of divine mercy in disguise. By spread...
Deborah's command rings out across the battlefield: arise, Barak, and lead your captives captive. The midrash compresses a whole theology of warfare into a single balanced phrase. ...
The midrash reads a single line of Deborah's song as a chain of warriors stretching across the centuries, all of them aimed at one enemy: Amalek. "From Ephraim, their root" points ...
The Jewish tradition grapples with these questions constantly, and sometimes the answers are found in the most unexpected places. a fascinating passage from the Yalkut Shimoni, a c...
The midrash sets Joseph and Esau side by side as two portraits hung on facing walls, each reversing the other. Joseph was the younger son yet earned the birthright; Esau was the fi...
