351 passages in Rabbinic Midrash
Individual passages from Yalkut Shimoni on Nach, shown in source order. Page 5 of 8.
The princes of Issachar marched with Deborah, and the rabbis pause to ask what made this tribe special. The answer comes from another verse praising the sons of Issachar as men who...
The sages noticed something tender in a difficult verse. When Leah went out to meet Jacob in the field and said plainly, "You shall come to me," she was not being shameless. She wa...
Rava made a sharp observation about who is truly fit to decide questions of Jewish law. Not every brilliant student, he said, becomes a reliable decisor. The young scholar who can ...
Where you pitch your tent matters. In the wilderness, the tribes camped in fixed positions around the Tabernacle, and the rabbis read those coordinates as a lesson in the company w...
Deborah's victory song names a strange detail: kings came and fought, yet "they took no plunder of silver." If these monarchs cared nothing for silver, why did they march to war at...
The rabbis hear an old promise being kept inside Deborah's song. When she sings that "the brook Kishon swept them away, that ancient brook," the word for ancient hints at a debt ol...
A single line in Deborah's song became a quarry for an entire body of Jewish court procedure. "Curse Meroz, said the angel of the LORD," and around it the sages built the laws of s...
The rabbis seize on a small but precise word in Deborah's curse. Meroz was condemned because it failed to come "to the help of the LORD." Not to the help of Israel, not to our help...
Deborah's song lifts up an unlikely heroine. Jael, the wife of Heber the Kenite, lured the fleeing general Sisera into her tent and killed him as he slept. By any ordinary measure ...
When Deborah sang that Jael would be "most blessed of women," the sages paused over the phrasing. Was such extravagant praise really fitting? They answer by pointing to ordinary hu...
The Song of Deborah says of Sisera that "between her feet he sank, he fell," and the sages read those repeated verbs as a record of Sisera's repeated violence against Jael. This ra...
Deborah's song says that Jael "put her hand to the tent peg." The sages noticed that the verse names only "her hand," without specifying which one, and they took that bare word to ...
The sages link Jael to the praise of the worthy woman in Proverbs, "She put her hand to the distaff." The verse about household work becomes, in their reading, a portrait of the wo...
Sisera's mother peers through the lattice and frets, "Why is his chariot so long in coming?" The Hebrew for "so long," boshesh, sets off a chain of associations, for the same root ...
Deborah's song lets us overhear three voices in a single scene that never agree with one another. Sisera's mother frets, "Why is his chariot so long in coming?" His wife and the no...
The Song of Deborah closes with a blessing: "But they that love Him shall be as the sun going forth in its might." The sages ask who exactly earns that radiance, and their answer i...
If the sun stands for those who love God, the sages press further: who shines brighter, the one who loves or the one who is beloved? They answer that the beloved is greater, so if ...
The verse in Daniel promises that the wise will one day shine like the brightness of the firmament, and that those who lead the many to righteousness will gleam like the stars fore...
Rabbi Simon makes a startling claim about sacred song. Not everyone who wishes to break into praise has earned the right to do so. Song of the highest kind belongs to the one for w...
Rabbi Huna bar Pappa draws a hard lesson out of the days of Gideon, when raiders from Midian and Amalek swept down on the fields of Israel year after year and stripped them bare. H...
The verse says that Israel in the time of Gideon was brought very low, and the sages press on the exact depth of that poverty. How low is very low? Low enough, they answer, that th...
The sages take up a small, surprising custom: greeting another person by invoking God's name, as when you wish someone "The LORD be with you." Is it permitted, even fitting, to bri...
Rabbi Yehudah bar Shalom fixes the moment the angel came to Gideon on a particular night of the year: the night of Passover. That is why Gideon's bitter question makes sense. When ...
Gideon builds an altar and names it with a single word: Peace. The sages read that name as more than a label for a place. The word for peace, Shalom, is treated here as one of the ...
The sages describe the topmost of the heavens, the one called Aravot, as a vast treasury where God keeps the most precious things in existence. It is not an empty sky but a storeho...
Gideon receives a strange command on the night the angel comes to him. God tells him to take his father's ox and a second bullock and to build an altar on the spot, tearing down th...
A single phrase from the story of Gideon's night raid, "the beginning of the middle watch" (Judges 7:19), sets the sages arguing over a basic question: how many watches divide the ...
When Israel pressed Gideon to take the crown for himself and his sons after his victory, he answered them with words that mark the deepest grain of Jewish kingship. He would not ru...
Scripture promises a few of its greatest figures a "good old age," a death ripe and untroubled. Resh Lakish counted three men marked by that phrase: Abraham, David, and Gideon. For...
The sages were not content to leave Gideon condemned without a defense, so they turned the case over once more. Read this way, both Gideon and the ones who urged the project on him...
When Gideon died, Israel turned to a god called Baal-berith, which the sages identify with the Fly-Baal worshiped at Ekron. The name is already a mockery. They had abandoned the Li...
Scripture lays a charge against the generation after Gideon: they did not remember the LORD their God, who had rescued them from every enemy around them (Judges 8:34). The very nex...
"Better a near neighbor than a distant brother," says the verse in Proverbs, and the sages read Israel's whole history into that single line. Jethro was a foreigner, far from the c...
When Jotham learned that his brother Abimelech had slaughtered their family, he climbed Mount Gerizim and spoke a parable down to the men of Shechem (Judges 9:7). The sages first a...
In Jotham's parable the vine refuses the crown with a memorable reason: should it abandon its new wine, "which gladdens God and men" (Judges 9:13)? Rabbi Shmuel bar Nachmani, in th...
A band of men crouched on the mountain ridges above Shechem, falling on every traveler who passed. From this verse the sages press a sharper question: who truly earns the name robb...
When his brothers drove him out, Jephthah ran to a place called Tov, which means "good." The verse states the name plainly, but Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi hears something more in it. ...
The verse says empty men gathered around Jephthah, and the sages seize on a common proverb the people repeated: a bad palm tree drifts toward a stand of barren trees. Like seeks li...
Jephthah, on the eve of battle, vowed that whatever first came out of the doors of his house to meet him on his safe return he would offer up to God. The words are reckless. He nam...
Jephthah lost his daughter, the sages say, because he was no man of Torah. Righteousness alone was not enough. Without learning, a righteous man has nothing in his hand, for it is ...
Could the girl have been saved? The sages say yes, and lay the blame on two proud men. Resh Lakish argues that Jephthah's vow had no force at all over a human being, just as one wh...
The sages line up four people who bound themselves with a vow and sort them into two outcomes. Two gained from what they pledged, and two suffered loss. The pattern is meant to be ...
Jephthah made his terrible vow, and the men of Ephraim came not to stop the sacrifice but to pick a quarrel. Phinehas the priest could have done two things. He could have rebuked E...
The judge called Ibzan of Bethlehem, the sages teach, is none other than Boaz, the wealthy man of Bethlehem who would later marry Ruth. Scripture records that he had thirty sons an...
When the angel appeared to Manoah's wife, he opened with words that seem cruel: "You are barren and have not borne." Bar Kappara draws something startling from this. He says the an...
The angel charged Samson's mother to live, even while pregnant, as if she herself were under the nazirite vow her son would carry. Drink no wine, no strong drink, he told her. And ...
When the angel returned, Scripture says "Manoah went after his wife." Rav Nachman read those words harshly and declared that Manoah was an ignoramus, a man so unlearned he literall...
Manoah pressed the messenger for his name, the way a man wants to record who brought such news. The angel refused, but his refusal is one of the most haunting answers in Scripture....
