2,211 passages in Rabbinic Midrash
Individual passages from Yalkut Shimoni on Torah, shown in source order. Page 10 of 47.
The sages add another reading of how Sodom fell. It went down like the child of a woman who sinned in secret and, ashamed, casts the infant out before it can see the light of day. ...
The brimstone that fell on Sodom is read as a foretaste of judgment to come. The soul recoils at its smell, the rabbis say, because it senses it may one day be judged by that same ...
When the verse says Abraham rose early in the morning and returned to the place where he had stood before the Lord, the sages find in it the origin of how Jews pray. The three dail...
The law of circumcision sets the eighth day, and any hour of that day is valid for the act. There is no requirement to perform it at dawn. A father who waits until afternoon has do...
The rabbis open with a puzzle from the Temple service: at what moment does fire "take hold" of an offering? Rabbi Yochanan answers from the smoke rising over Sodom, the smoke of a ...
Scripture says the two daughters of Lot "conceived by their father," and the midrash hears in the phrasing that they took the initiative themselves. Rabbi Nachman bar Chanin states...
The sages now flip the reading they have just given. Where one teaching said the first conception of Moab was for Heaven and the later Moabites acted for harlotry, this second voic...
A third reading turns the spotlight back onto Lot himself. The verse says the daughters "conceived by their father," and the midrash presses on the word "father": the responsibilit...
The two daughters each named a son, and each name held a confession. The firstborn called her child "Moab," a name that all but announces "from my father." The younger called hers ...
Rabbi Yehoshua ben Korchah turns the cave story into a lesson about timing. His rule: a person should always hasten to do a mitzvah. Even when two people set out to do the same goo...
Rabbi Eivo measures the two daughters by their discretion. The firstborn flaunted her father's shame in the very name of her son, "Moab," plainly "from father." So while God forbid...
A single verse of travel - "and Abraham journeyed from there toward the land of the Negev" - is read through a line from Job, and two figures appear inside it. "The falling mountai...
When Sodom lay in ruins, the roads emptied. No more travelers passed Abraham's tent, and that troubled him for a reason most people would never guess. He was not worried about comm...
Abimelech sent for Sarah and took her, and the text leaves no room for the polite reading. She did not go willingly. He seized her by force. That same night God came to him in a dr...
What happens when a man does wrong while honestly believing he is in the clear? The sages debate a stark case: someone acts thinking the object of his act is permitted, then learns...
Money does not buy a clean conscience. The sages taught that the fixed sums a court awards cover only the shame of an injury, not the deeper hurt. For that wound, even a man who br...
Out of a single verse describing a married woman, the sages built the whole law of how a marriage begins. The Mishnah teaches that a woman enters betrothal in three ways: by money,...
Sometimes the whole weight of a ruling rests on three words. Rabbi Chanina takes the biblical phrase that describes a wife as one "possessed by a husband" and draws a precise line ...
The phrase that names a wife "possessed by a husband" gets turned around by the sages into a statement about honor. Rav reads it to mean that the husband was crowned through her, l...
Caught in a dream he could not argue away, Abimelech mounted a defense. Would God really destroy a righteous nation? Abraham told me she was his sister, and Sarah said it too, and ...
When Abimelech accused Abraham of deceiving him about Sarah, Abraham answered in the king's own terms. He pointed back to a single verse in the Torah that, the sages teach, opens l...
The thousand pieces of silver can be read another way, the midrash suggests, not as coins at all but as a covering. Abimelech, the reading goes, meant for Sarah to be wrapped so th...
When Abimelech learned that Sarah, whom he had taken into his house, was in truth Abraham's wife and not his sister, he was stung less by the danger he had escaped than by the dece...
The sages set two explanations side by side for why Isaac's vision failed him in old age. One teaching warns that it is forbidden to fix one's gaze upon the face of a wicked person...
The sages thread together a teaching on the obligations of marriage with the moment Abraham's prayer broke open the sealed house of Abimelech. The rabbis first map out what a husba...
The sages first weigh just how thorough the affliction on Abimelech's house had been, debating how many channels of the body were sealed in the men and in the women, until they not...
This short teaching turns the Abimelech story into a rule of conduct that still binds anyone who has done harm. When a person injures another, the obligation does not end with paym...
This sweeping passage gathers verse after verse to celebrate the moment the LORD remembered Sarah and gave the barren matriarch her son. The sages read the prophets as if they were...
The sages teach that Sarah, Rachel, and Hannah were all remembered on Rosh Hashanah, the day heaven turns its attention to the world. Rabbi Eleazar links the three barren women thr...
The sages dwell on the newborn Isaac and find meaning in every detail of his arrival. When the Torah calls him a son of Abraham's old age, they read that the radiance of Isaac's fa...
What does a father owe his son? The Sages drew up a list that reads almost like a covenant of fatherhood. He must bring the boy into the covenant through circumcision. He must rede...
When Sarah finally held her son, she said that God had made laughter for her, and that everyone who heard would laugh along with her. The Sages refused to read that joy as private....
The miracle of Isaac's birth did not silence the gossips. The nations whispered that an old woman like Sarah could never have borne a child, and that the baby must really be the so...
On the day Abraham weaned Isaac he threw a great feast, and the feast became a courtroom. The nations sneered that the old couple had simply picked up an abandoned baby from the ma...
The verse says simply that the child grew, but the Sages saw in it a glimpse of the final banquet God will set for the righteous in the world to come. When the meal ends, someone m...
Scripture records a small domestic fact, that the boy grew and was weaned, but the Sages refused to let the word "weaned" stay small. They heard in it the story of a soul learning ...
When Abraham made his great feast, the Sages say the celebration drew in the powers of the world, including the giant Og and the kings of the earth. These were the same skeptics wh...
This episode is counted as the ninth of Abraham's trials. Ishmael had grown into a skilled archer, and the Sages tell that he turned his skill on his half-brother. From behind a cu...
Sarah's command lands like a blade: cast out the slave woman and her son. And the Holy One, blessed be He, tells Abraham to obey her voice. The Maggid lingers on the strange phrasi...
Hagar's cry is not gentle. Rabbi Berechiah hears in the words "a bowshot away" a woman hurling her grief straight at heaven. Yesterday, she protests, You swore to multiply my offsp...
A legal puzzle sharpens the meaning of a single verse. Suppose a person binds himself by a vow: I will take no benefit from the seed of Abraham. Whom has he cut himself off from? T...
Abraham does not simply abandon Hagar. He sends her with a writ of divorce and ties a veil at her waist so all will know she is a maidservant, and he memorizes the road they take, ...
Two giants of the Mishnah spar over a single untranslatable word. Rabbi Ishmael challenges Rabbi Akiva: you sat at the feet of Nahum of Gimzo for twenty-two years, learning that th...
The warning is blunt: guard your heart and do not enter into a business partnership with a gentile, because it ends in a binding covenant you never meant to make. The proof is Abra...
Abimelech comes to make peace, and the Maggid hears the verse from Proverbs behind it: when God is pleased with a man's ways, even his enemies make peace with him. The nations had ...
Abraham plants an eshel at Beer-sheba, and the sages will not let the word stay small. One says it was an orchard heavy with every choice fruit; another says it was a roadside inn,...
What was the eshel that Abraham planted in the land of the Philistines? The sages refused to let a single word stand still. Rabbi Judah heard in it the word "ask," and pictured an ...
"After these things God tested Abraham." The sages opened this verse with a line from the Psalms: "You have given a banner to those who fear You, to be raised up, because of the tr...
