351 passages in Rabbinic Midrash
Individual passages from Yalkut Shimoni on Nach, shown in source order. Page 6 of 8.
Manoah, told that the stranger was an angel, brought a young goat and a meal offering and laid them on a rock to offer them up to the Lord. This raises a real difficulty for the sa...
Scripture tells us briefly that the child Samson grew and that the Lord blessed him, but it does not say in what the blessing consisted. The sages, reading closely, fill in the sil...
When the spirit of the Lord first began to stir in Samson, the sages heard the fulfillment of an old promise. Jacob, on his deathbed, had blessed his son Dan, calling him a serpent...
The Sages noticed a small puzzle hiding in two verses. When Samson goes to Timnah, the text says he "went down" (Judges 14:1). But when Judah goes to the very same Timnah, the text...
Samson tells his parents to fetch the Philistine woman with a phrase that should make us pause: "she is pleasing in my eyes" (Judges 14:2-3). The Sages hear in those words the seed...
As Samson walks toward Timnah with his parents, they pass through its vineyards, and the Sages turn this detail into a warning spoken between the lines. Rabbi Shmuel bar Rav Yitzch...
From a single phrase about Samson's parents, the Sages build a teaching that reaches across all three parts of Scripture. The verse says they "did not know that it was from the LOR...
Where do the seven days of wedding celebration come from? The Sages anchor the custom in two figures: Jacob, who completed Leah's wedding week, and Samson, who threw a seven-day fe...
Samson's riddle is born from a marvel he witnessed himself: he had killed a lion, and later found that bees had made honey in its carcass. Out of the great devourer came sweetness....
When Samson takes revenge on the Philistines for betraying him, he does it in a peculiar way. He catches three hundred foxes, ties them tail to tail with torches between them, and ...
After Samson slays a thousand Philistines with the jawbone of a donkey, he collapses in thirst, and a miracle saves him: God splits open a hollow place at Lehi, water gushes out, a...
The men of Gaza thought they had Samson trapped. They had bolted the city gate and waited through the night, certain that come morning they would seize him. They did not understand...
Rabbi Meir loved to read a person's nature out of their name, and the woman from the valley of Sorek gave him everything he needed. Delilah. The sound of it, he said, was no accide...
Three times Samson had lied to Delilah. Fresh cords, new ropes, the loom and the web. Each time the Philistines sprang their trap and each time he broke free, leaving her holding a...
The verse says Delilah pressed Samson day after day with her words until she wore his soul down. But the unusual word the text chooses, va-tealitzehu, made the sages look closer at...
The verse measures the toll of Delilah's campaign on Samson with a stark phrase: his soul was shortened, vexed unto death. The daily pressing had not just annoyed him. It had hollo...
The Book of Judges reports the end of Samson's freedom in one merciless clause: the Philistines put out his eyes. The midrash hears in this an echo of a line from Ecclesiastes that...
The Rabbis taught a sobering law of measure for measure. Five men carried in their bodies something of a likeness to the pattern above, an excellence that set them apart, and every...
Scripture closes its account of the captive Samson with a humble image: blinded and bound, he turned the grindstone in the Philistine prison house. The plain picture is degradation...
At the very end, blind and bound between the pillars of the Philistine temple, Samson did not bargain with God. He reached back into his own past for a claim. The midrash hears two...
Samson had two eyes, and the Philistines had gouged out both. So when he prayed to be avenged, the sages caught something precise in his wording. He asked to be avenged for one of ...
Micah set up a private shrine with a carved idol, and yet the sages refused to list him among those barred from the world to come. The reason is almost shockingly small. His door w...
The spies of Dan recognized the young priest at Micah's shrine and pressed him hard. Three times they threw his ancestry in his face. Are you not from Moses, who was told to keep h...
In the verse naming the idolatrous priest, one letter hangs above the line. The nun in Manasseh is suspended, written half in and half out of the name. Rabbi Shmuel bar Nachmani re...
When the tribe of Dan carried off Micah's idol and his hired priest and went to conquer Laish, the sages did not see God's patience as weakness. They draped the whole episode in a ...
Scripture says the concubine played the harlot against her master, but the sages soften the betrayal into something domestic and small. Rabbi Eviatar said he found a fly in the foo...
When the Levite's father-in-law urges him, Sustain your heart with a morsel of bread, the words sound like ordinary hospitality. Rabbi Yitzchak hears something larger. He notices t...
When the tribes of Israel rose against the outrage at Gibeah, Scripture chooses a striking phrase to describe them. It says they assembled united as one man, gathered against the c...
When Phinehas the priest stood before Israel in the dark days of the war at Gibeah, he held an instrument of inquiry unlike prayer or prophecy. The sages preserved its careful chor...
The tribes of Israel rose in righteous fury over the crime at Gibeah, mustering an army to punish Benjamin for the outrage done to the concubine. Their zeal looked holy. Yet the Ho...
After the war against Benjamin, Israel needed wives for the survivors and turned to Jabesh-Gilead, sparing only the virgins. Scripture says they found four hundred young women "who...
After the war, Israel had bound itself with a terrible vow. Cursed be the one who gives his daughter to Benjamin. The decimated tribe faced extinction, unable to find wives among t...
The oath that nearly erased the tribe of Benjamin had been sworn in the heat of grief at Mizpah. Israel pledged that none of them would give a daughter to a Benjaminite as a wife. ...
As Israel scrambled to save the remnant of Benjamin, the elders spoke a phrase of mercy. There must be an inheritance for the survivors, that a tribe be not blotted out of Israel. ...
When Scripture recounts the war at Gibeah, divine names appear in the verses, and the sages disagreed over their weight. Rabbi Eliezer held that these names were ordinary words, no...
The Rabbis loved to count. Forty-eight prophets, seven prophetesses, and not one of them changed a single letter of the Torah, except for the Scroll of Esther read at Purim. But th...
This is a brief cross-reference, the kind of marginal note that holds the great collection together. The Yalkut gathers teachings from across the rabbinic library and stitches them...
A small grammatical habit becomes a doorway into character. When Scripture introduces the wicked, it puts the man before his name: Nabal was his name, Sheba son of Bichri was his n...
A genealogy that most readers skim becomes, for the Sages, a coded text worth decrypting. Elkanah's line runs back through Jeroham, Elihu, and Tohu, and one tradition reads the nam...
The Sages weigh a single verse two ways. To Rabbi Ammi, Scripture opens with Elkanah's praise and closes with his praise. To Rabbi Levi, it opens with praise but also lets his disg...
Rabbi Levi notices a pattern that runs like a hidden current through the whole of Scripture. Wherever the text declares that a woman has nothing, it is quietly promising that one d...
The verse says simply that Elkanah went up, but the Sages hear in the word a whole life of rising. He was elevated in his house, in his courtyard, in his city, and at last among al...
Scripture calls the sons of Eli worthless and says they lay with the women at the Tent of Meeting. Yet Rabbi Jonathan makes a startling claim: whoever says the sons of Eli sinned i...
Scripture marks the moment with a small phrase that the sages refused to read as small. "And it came to pass the day," the verse says, and Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi heard in that sin...
Elkanah loved Hannah, and Scripture does not hide it. While Peninnah had a houseful of sons and daughters to feed, Hannah had no child at all, and the verse says her husband gave h...
The cruelty was patient and daily. Peninnah did not strike Hannah once and stop. She provoked her, and then provoked her again, wearing a groove into the same wound morning after m...
Rabbi Levi pressed a startling claim: two of the most painful figures in Scripture may have meant well. Both Satan, the accuser, and Peninnah, the rival wife, he said, directed the...
Elkanah saw his wife weeping and refusing to eat, and he tried to console her by holding up the matriarchs as mirrors. Did Sarah, barren for so long, sit and dissolve in tears like...
