2,211 passages in Rabbinic Midrash
Individual passages from Yalkut Shimoni on Torah, shown in source order. Page 12 of 47.
The sages read the sale of Abraham's field as a textbook in real-estate law. When a person sells a field, what exactly changes hands along with the soil? The sages drew a careful l...
Why does the Torah say "the sons of Heth" ten full times in this chapter, when once would do? Rabbi Elazar pictured the cost in ink poured out and quills snapped to write the phras...
When the Torah says "and Abraham was old, well advanced in days" (Genesis 24:1), the sages heard a crown being placed on his head. "A crown of glory is gray hair, found in the way ...
Rabbi Hama bar Hanina made a bold historical claim: from the days of the patriarchs onward, the house of study never once fell silent in Israel. Wherever the people went, a place o...
The sages noticed something strange in the Torah's silence. Before Abraham, no verse ever describes anyone as visibly old. They imagined the reason: fathers and sons looked so alik...
This second telling turns the patriarchs into petitioners who each asked God to introduce a new feature of human mortality, and each request was for the good. Abraham asked for old...
When Scripture says that the LORD had blessed Abraham in all things, the sages press on that little word "all" and ask what stands behind so total a gift. They answer that the bles...
What exactly was the "all" with which God blessed Abraham? The sages disagree, and the dispute is half the delight. Rabbi Meir reads the blessing as a relief: Abraham had no daught...
The sages keep mining the word "all," and here they turn it toward the next generations. One reading holds that part of Abraham's complete blessing was simply this: Esau did not re...
From the three little words scattered across the patriarchs' stories, "in all," "of all," and "all," the sages build a ladder of the people whom death and corruption could not full...
Scripture introduces the man Abraham sends to find a wife for Isaac as the servant, the elder of his household, who ruled over all that his master owned. The sages refuse to let th...
Why did the patriarchs hold the commandment of circumcision so dear, dear enough to swear their gravest oaths upon it? The sages give a reason that reaches past this life. They kne...
Abraham binds his servant Eliezer by an oath "by the LORD, the God of heaven," and the sages catch a quiet history in that title. Before Abraham made God known to the world, He was...
Eliezer brings his caravan to the well outside the city and makes the camels kneel, lowering the tall animals to rest. The Torah notes the hour precisely: evening, the time when th...
When Abraham sent his servant to find a wife for Isaac, Eliezer set out on a road that the sages picture as pitch dark. He had no torch of his own. The prophet's words fit him exac...
Four men in Scripture, the sages say, bound themselves to vows they had not thought through. Each left the outcome wide open, trusting to chance what should have been weighed with ...
Eliezer prayed at the well, and the answer arrived before he had finished asking. The sages place him in rare company. Only three people were answered while the words were still on...
A single word tells you everything about a person, and the sages caught Eliezer in one. At the well he asked Rebecca to let him sip a little water. Just a sip. The verse from Prove...
When Eliezer found Rebecca, he set gold upon her, and the sages read the gifts as quiet prophecy. The nose-ring weighed a beka, and the two bracelets on her hands weighed ten gold ...
The moment Laban saw the gold, the midrash says, he ran out not to welcome Eliezer but to murder him for it. Eliezer read the man's haste and answered with a wonder. He uttered a h...
When Eliezer told his story, he began with the words he might have hidden: I am Abraham's servant. The sages praised the honesty. The thing you are ashamed of, say it first. He had...
The family in Haran was not won over by Eliezer's mission. Seeing the gold bracelets, they plotted to kill him, until they watched him hoist two camels, one in each hand, and carry...
When Abraham's servant laid out his errand, the answer from Laban and Bethuel was startling in its surrender. These were not men known for piety, yet they conceded at once: "The ma...
The servant's plea to be told whether to turn right or left was read by the sages as a map of the families he might have approached instead. Turning right meant Ishmael's line; tur...
A single odd word in the negotiation over Rebecca became, in rabbinic hands, the source for a rule of marriage law. When her family asked that she remain "days, or ten" before leav...
The request to keep Rebecca for "days, or ten" gets read here on two layers at once. The "days" are the seven days of mourning the household now owed, since Bethuel had just died i...
From the single line that Rebecca's family "blessed" her, the sages anchored an entire institution of Jewish marriage. The wedding blessing is no mere ceremony of good wishes. With...
As Rebecca departed, her family pronounced the great blessing, "may you become thousands of myriads" (Genesis 24:60). Yet the sages noticed she remained childless for years, and th...
The first thing Rebecca saw of Isaac was his hand stretched out in prayer, and she knew at once she was looking at a great man. Startled, she slipped from the camel, though the sag...
Scripture says Isaac was comforted for his mother only after Rebecca entered his life, and Rabbi Yose measured the grief precisely: Isaac mourned Sarah for three years before he to...
Rabbi Yudan reads the order of the verses as a quiet lesson in how a household should be run. Look at the sequence in Scripture, he says. First Isaac is settled: "And Isaac brought...
The sages take the opening line of the Book of Psalms and read it, phrase by phrase, as a portrait of Abraham. "Happy is the man who walks not in the counsel of the wicked": he ref...
A folk proverb opens the passage: one who hears his neighbor eating while he himself goes hungry feels sixty pangs reach his teeth. Where, the sages ask, is such longing rooted in ...
"Abraham gave all that he had to Isaac." But what exactly was "all"? The sages divide on it. Rabbi Yehudah says it was the birthright. Rabbi Nehemyah says it was the blessing. The ...
The verse about Abraham's gifts to the concubines' sons becomes the seed of a courtroom drama. In the days of Alexander of Macedon, three peoples came to sue Israel: the children o...
The rabbis recall a date: the twenty-fifth of Nisan, when the tax officers were lifted from Judah and Jerusalem. The occasion was another lawsuit, this time brought by the people o...
The Torah marks Abraham's passing with two words, "he expired and died," and the sages pause over the loss those words contain. Rav Chanan bar Rava, in the name of Rav, paints the ...
This short teaching turns a hard fact of life, a long and painful final illness, into a sign of favor. Rabbi Yehudah bar Ilai observes that the earliest generations of the pious of...
The sages asked a hard question: is there any mercy in death? Rabbi Yehudah and Rabbi Abahu answered with two images drawn from ordinary life. A lamp that burns down and goes out o...
A single phrase in the Torah carries a whole story of return. When Abraham died, the verse says, "Isaac and Ishmael his sons buried him." The sages noticed the order. Ishmael was t...
The Torah touches on this very idea, and it's more profound than it first appears. Think about Abraham. He's already a patriarch, a leader, a man of faith. But something is missing...
Rabbi Simon noticed a phrase that haunts the Bible. Whenever Scripture says "and it came to pass after," something good slips away from the world. After Abraham died, the Philistin...
The Torah opens Isaac's story with a doubled name: "Isaac son of Abraham, Abraham begot Isaac." Why say it twice? Because the joy of a righteous man is sharpest when he is a righte...
Not every parent and child reflect glory on one another. Sometimes a noble son is shamed by the father who came before him. King Josiah, for all his reforms, bore the stain of his ...
This short calculation ties three moments together by counting backward through the years. The Torah states plainly that Isaac was forty when he married Rebekah. The sages then ask...
This brief tradition lines up history into matching pairs, each member living exactly as many years as its partner. The list reaches across the whole sweep of Israel's story, from ...
The Torah goes out of its way to call Rebekah "daughter of Bethuel the Aramean, sister of Laban the Aramean." Once it has told us she came from Paddan-Aram, why repeat the family's...
The rabbis noticed something hidden inside a single word. When Scripture says that Isaac entreated the LORD on behalf of his barren wife, the Hebrew verb for his pleading shares it...
