2,211 passages in Rabbinic Midrash
Individual passages from Yalkut Shimoni on Torah, shown in source order. Page 13 of 47.
Rabbi Yitzchak read the verse closely and drew an uncomfortable conclusion. Scripture says Isaac entreated the LORD opposite his wife, not merely for her. The word choice, he argue...
The Torah uses a strange, forceful word for what happened inside Rebecca: the twins did not merely move, they struggled. The sages, refusing to let the word sit quietly, offered th...
The midrash turns the womb into a compass. When Rebecca walked past a shrine of idols, one twin would lunge to get out; when she passed a house of prayer or study, the other twin w...
This reading lifts the quarrel out of Rebecca's body and into the heavens. The two children, the sages say, were not merely jostling; they were dividing the inheritance of the worl...
The verse reads "two nations," but the rabbis heard, with a slight shift of the vowels, "two proud ones." Each twin would father a man of towering arrogance: Hadrian rising among t...
Rav, transmitting in the name of his teacher, takes the same wordplay reading "proud ones" instead of "nations" and lands it in a surprising place: not on enemies, but on a famous ...
The verse promises that one of Rebecca's peoples will grow strong at the other's expense, and Rabbi Nachman finds the proof in something as ordinary as vinegar. He traces a reversa...
The sages read the future of empires in the lines of Scripture. Caesarea, the Roman city, and Jerusalem: these two cannot flourish together. If someone tells you both are thriving,...
Why did Esau force his way out before his brother? One teaching says it was mercy in disguise: he came out first so that all his blood and filth would spill out ahead, like the att...
A single terse line of midrash reaches for the root of Esau's violence and finds it before he ever drew breath. The Torah calls him red the moment he is born, and the sages refuse ...
A Roman official, uneasy about the future of his empire, came to Rabban Gamliel with a blunt question: who will take the kingdom after we are gone? The sage did not lecture or argu...
The midrash draws a hard lesson from the moment Jacob seized his brother's heel. That grip was not only a detail of birth. It was a sign of how the long contest between the brother...
The Torah says the boys grew up, and the sages reach for a parable from the garden. Picture a fragrant myrtle and a thornbush sprouting side by side. While they are small, no one c...
The same verse that says the boys grew up sends them down opposite roads. Jacob took the way of life. He dwelt in tents and gave his days to Torah, sitting at the feet of the elder...
The Torah notes plainly that Isaac loved Esau and Rebekah loved Jacob, and the midrash listens closely to why. Esau's love came in through Isaac's mouth. The verse says the hunt wa...
The day Abraham died, the world lost its first witness to faith, and Esau treated the loss like a riddle to be solved. He came in from the field and smelled the lentils cooking, an...
The arithmetic is quiet but devastating. Abraham lived a hundred and seventy-five years; Isaac lived a hundred and eighty. So Abraham, the greater man, was cut five years short of ...
Esau is the Red One, and the color clings to him like a verdict. He came out of the womb ruddy. His stew was red, and he gulped it down with a name that stuck: Edom, which means re...
The bargain over the birthright did not begin at the cooking fire. The sages say it began before either brother drew breath, while the twins still wrestled in Rebecca's womb. There...
When Jacob said "Sell me, as of this day," Rabbi Aha hears a smaller and sadder request hidden inside the words: sell me even one day of your own. Because if you add up all the yea...
Esau's words "I am going to die" carry a second story. The sages say Nimrod was hunting him, hungry for the garment Esau wore, the very robe that had once belonged to Adam. It was ...
The lentils on Jacob's table held both feelings at once. They were the food of mourning, for Abraham had just died, and yet that same meal carried joy, because Jacob had won the bi...
When famine struck the land, Isaac did not flee to Egypt as others might. The sages read his story through the Psalms: "The LORD knows the days of the blameless," and the blameless...
When famine pressed in on Isaac, the easy road ran south. His father Abraham had taken it; Egypt was where grain was stored and bellies were filled. But the word came to Isaac befo...
Why was Isaac, alone among the patriarchs, forbidden to leave the land even when hunger drove others abroad? The sages give an answer rooted in the moment on Mount Moriah. Isaac ha...
The verse praises Abraham because he obeyed God's voice and kept His charge, His commandments, His statutes, and His laws. Rav reads that pileup of words and draws a startling conc...
Scripture says the days grew long for Isaac in Gerar, and Rabbi Yochanan hears in that phrase a quiet law of the soul. Three heavy things, he teaches, are dissolved by the passage ...
The plain verse says Isaac sowed in the land and found a hundredfold in a single year. The sages read "sowed" against the grain and hear a second harvest beneath the wheat. Isaac t...
Scripture piles up the verbs to describe Isaac's rise: he grew great, and went on growing, until he became very great. The sages turn it into a saying that must have stung the men ...
How many wells did Isaac dig at Beersheba? The sages turn the count into a map of meaning. Rabbi Yehudah ben Simon says four, matching the four banners under which Isaac's descenda...
When Abimelech comes to make peace with Isaac, the king arrives humbled, and the sages find his humiliation hidden in the very words of the verse. Scripture says he went "from Gera...
The Torah records that Abimelech and his men told Isaac, "We have surely seen that God is with you, so let there be an oath between us that you will do us no harm." The sages notic...
Esau waited until he turned forty to marry, and he announced it loudly. His father Isaac had married at forty, so Esau declared he would do the same. The sages saw through the perf...
When Esau married the Hittite woman Judith, the sages said he had simply gone to find his own kind. Scripture warns about "every raven after its kind," and like seeks like. They to...
When Esau brought home his pagan Hittite wives, the Torah says they were a bitterness of spirit "to Isaac and to Rebecca." The sages paused on the order of those names. A wife is u...
The sages offered one more reason that the Torah lists Isaac's grief before Rebecca's when Esau's idolatrous wives entered the family. It has nothing to do with blame and everythin...
The sages gave a final reason that the Torah names Isaac's grief before Rebecca's when Esau married his pagan wives. The bitterness those women carried into the home did more than ...
The Torah says that when Isaac grew old, his eyes became too dim to see. Rabbi Isaac connected this to a verse in Isaiah that condemns "those who justify the wicked for a bribe." E...
The sages kept circling the mystery of Isaac's blindness, and they offered several windows into it. Rabbi Isaac argued from the lighter case to the heavier. Isaac owed Esau a fathe...
The verse says that when Isaac grew old, his eyes were too dim to see. The sages asked what could possibly have dimmed the eyes of so great a man, and they reached back to the most...
How did Isaac, a man of perfect faith, come to lose his sight in old age? The sages gave three answers, and each one turns his blindness into a sign rather than a misfortune. The f...
The night Isaac called for Esau, the sages taught, was the night of Passover. Isaac sensed that something holy was stirring. He told his elder son that on this night the heavenly b...
Scripture twice calls Esau "great," once by his father and once when Rebekah takes "the garments of Esau her great son." The sages told a parable to cut him down. A woman with a dw...
When Isaac told Esau to take up his weapons, the sages heard more than a hunting order. They read the whole future of Israel's exile hidden in those few words. "Your weapons" point...
The sages found a hidden plea for mercy even in the law of the scapegoat. The goat that "carries all their iniquities" they read as Esau the hairy man bearing away the sins of Jaco...
The verse notes that Rebekah took Esau's garments that were "with her in the house," the clothes he wore when he served his father. The rabbis paused there, because Esau served Isa...
The teaching moves from the story of Jacob's disguise into the world of law, and it shows how the rabbis mined a single word for a binding rule. The Torah three times forbids cooki...
Rebekah does not let her son cross the threshold alone. She walks him to the door, hands him the savory food, and lets go: until here I owed you my help, but from here on let your ...
