2,211 passages in Rabbinic Midrash
Individual passages from Yalkut Shimoni on Torah, shown in source order. Page 11 of 47.
"The LORD tests the righteous." Why the righteous and not the wicked? Three pictures answer the question. The potter, said the sages, never taps a cracked jug to test it, because i...
What were the "things" after which God tested Abraham? One tradition overhears a quarrel between the two brothers. Isaac and Ishmael were arguing over who stood closer to their fat...
Two sages weighed what the trial meant. Rabbi Yose the Galilean read it as elevation: God raised Abraham high, like the banner on a ship's mast. Rabbi Akiva insisted on something f...
What were the "things" that triggered the trial? Rabbi Yochanan, in the name of Rabbi Yose ben Zimra, traced them to the mouth of Satan. The verse just before says, "And the child ...
Why test a man already proven? The midrash answers with a parable. A king had a poor friend and resolved to enrich him, handing him capital to trade with. The friend prospered and ...
This was the tenth and final trial, the summit of all that came before. "After these things God tested Abraham." The midrash sets the scene with a quiet detail that sharpens the bl...
When God spoke to Abraham, He chose His words with the care of a request, not a command. The little word "please" carried the whole weight of the test. And when He named the destin...
God's call to the Binding was framed not as an order but as a plea. The sages compared it to a king beset by war after war, who had one champion that never failed him. When the fie...
Abraham rose at first light and saddled his own donkey for the journey to Moriah. A man of his wealth had servants for such work, so why do it himself? Rabbi Shimon ben Yochai drew...
Before the journey, Abraham split the wood he would need for the offering, two strokes of the axe. The sages saw in those strokes a seed planted in eternity. Because Abraham split ...
When Abraham asked which mountain, God told him to watch for the place where His glory stood waiting. So Abraham rose early and saddled his donkey, and the sages identify that anim...
It was on the third day that Abraham lifted his eyes and saw Moriah waiting from afar. The sages noticed how often deliverance arrives precisely on a third day, and they gathered t...
The rabbis taught that on the very day Abraham bound Isaac upon the altar, God established the daily offerings that Israel would bring forever after, one lamb in the morning and on...
Rabbi Yitzchak lingered over a single word in the verse. Scripture says Abraham saw the place "from afar." Why that word, when the destination was already in view? He heard in it a...
The journey to the mountain took three days, and on the third morning the place revealed itself. Abraham lifted his eyes and saw something no map could have marked: a column of fir...
The road to Moriah was short, so why did it swallow three days? Because something was fighting them every step. When Abraham and Isaac refused to listen to Satan's whispers, he sto...
Abraham saw the place from far off, but the place he saw had not always looked that way. In the beginning the ground that would hold the altar was not a peak at all. It was a low v...
A single phrase Abraham speaks before the climb becomes a doorway into law. He tells the young men, "Stay here with the donkey," and the Sages read those words twice. On the surfac...
Rava builds a sharp little ruling on the same overheard phrase. Picture an ox that gores a pregnant maidservant so that she loses the child she carries. Who pays, and for what? Rav...
Abraham's parting words to his servants carry far more than travel instructions. "Stay here with the donkey," he says, and the Sages hear a promise that reaches to the end of days:...
Abraham laid the wood of the offering on Isaac's shoulder, and the image is heavy with meaning: a man bearing on his back the very instrument of his own death. In his own hand the ...
As Abraham bound his son on the altar below, something was happening above. The Holy One was binding the heavenly princes of the nations at the same moment, and so long as Israel s...
The Sages refuse to read this altar as new. "He built there the altar" - not an altar but the altar, the same stones where Cain and Abel laid their offerings, where Noah and his so...
Abraham will not be talked off the mountain easily. When the angel calls his name twice, he stops, but he wants more than a messenger. "God spoke to me directly when He sent me up ...
The ram was no accident of the landscape. The Sages say it was created at the very edge of creation, at twilight on the sixth day, and held in reserve for exactly this morning. Now...
Two teachers dispute where the ram came from, and the gap between them is the whole distance between the ordinary and the wondrous. Rabbi Eliezer keeps it earthbound: the animal si...
The Sages catch on a single odd word: the ram appears "afterward," achar. After what? After everything, they answer, reading the animal's struggle as a vision of all the history st...
Two righteous men named the same hill, and God refused to choose between them. Abraham, after the binding, called it "Yireh" - the place where the Lord will see and be seen. Long b...
Standing on the mountain, Abraham is shown more than a single moment. The verse hides three tenses of the same holy place. "The Lord will see" - there it stands, built. "As it is s...
The timing is the whole point. "After these things" - after the knife, after the ram, while Abraham is still standing on Moriah with the smoke of the offering not yet cleared - wor...
When Abraham came down from Mount Moriah, his heart was unsettled. The knife had not fallen, but the thought of what nearly happened would not leave him. He turned the worry over a...
The worry that gripped Abraham, the sages say, was not only about a wife for Isaac. He was afraid of suffering itself, the bitter days that might come upon a righteous house. The H...
The book of Psalms says, "The LORD knows the days of the blameless, and their inheritance shall be forever" (Psalms 37:18). The sages read that verse over the life of Sarah. The wo...
"The sun rises and the sun sets," says Ecclesiastes, and the sages asked what such an obvious line could be teaching. Their answer reaches far past astronomy. Before the Holy One, ...
The Torah calls the burial cave Abraham bought "the cave of Machpelah," and the name itself puzzled the sages. Machpelah comes from a root meaning doubled or folded over, so what e...
Scripture sets the deeds of Egypt and the deeds of Canaan side by side as warnings, two corrupt lands a Jew must not imitate (Leviticus 18:3). The Canaanites, then, were no righteo...
The place where Sarah was buried carries the name Kiriath-arba, the city of four (Genesis 23:19). The sages, ever attentive to a name, read in that number a quiet promise about who...
Abraham came down from Mount Moriah at peace. The knife had been stayed, Isaac was alive, and the offering had been accepted. But one creature was not at peace. Samael, the accusin...
Stand at the edge of a grave and a quiet question rises: when we gather to praise the dead, whom does the praise really serve? The mourners who need comfort, or the one who has alr...
Scripture says Abraham "came" to mourn Sarah, but came from where? Rabbi Levi guessed he was returning from his father Terah's funeral. Rabbi Yose shut that down at once: the arith...
The Torah commands Israel to recall the Exodus from Egypt "all the days of your life" (Deuteronomy 16:3). Every day, then, even the hardest? Rabbi Bun reads the phrase with a caref...
When exactly does the mourner's exemption end? Rav Asi sets the line not at the physical sight of the body but at the unfinished duty. As long as the obligation to bury rests on yo...
Abraham approaches the Hittites with words that sound humble and sound bold at once: "A stranger and a resident am I among you" (Genesis 23:4). The Sages hear two postures packed i...
The Hittites answer Abraham with a flood of flattery. "Hear us, my lord," they say, calling him a king over them, a prince over them, even a god over them. Abraham deflects the pra...
A purchase of a burial cave becomes, in the hands of the Sages, the source for one of the foundations of Jewish marriage. The Mishnah teaches that a woman enters marriage in three ...
Ephron's smooth talk hides a grasping heart. He names his price almost in passing, "a land worth four hundred shekels of silver, what is that between me and you?" The Sages strip a...
When the rabbis weighed the language of Scripture, they noticed that the word "shekel" does not always mean the same thing. Rabbi Hanina taught that in the Torah a shekel is a sela...
The Torah says that "the field of Ephron arose" (Genesis 23:17), and the sages refused to read that verb casually. A field does not literally stand up. So they heard in it a rise i...
