2,211 passages in Rabbinic Midrash
Individual passages from Yalkut Shimoni on Torah, shown in source order. Page 14 of 47.
The prophets glimpsed the angels and reported something strange. Ezekiel saw their wings drop when they paused; Isaiah saw seraphim standing fixed. So which is it, do the heavenly ...
A short, sharp teaching that measures two kinds of power. Esau's power is the power of the hand, and the hand has a fatal limit. It can only grip what it can reach. Catch a man and...
The word for voice in Hebrew is also the word for thunder, and the midrash hears both at once. The thunder at Sinai, the roar of the storm, the rush of falling rain: all of it, the...
Here the ancient family quarrel is read straight into history. The rabbis no longer treat "the hands of Esau" as a figure of speech. They name names, and the names are the emperors...
One sentence, and it carries an enormous claim. The rabbis take the voice of Jacob and read it as the voice of all prayer. No prayer is accepted on high, they say, unless it contai...
Scripture says Isaac did not recognize Jacob because his hands felt hairy like Esau's. The rabbis press on the word "recognize" and find something deeper than a blanket of goatskin...
The verse mentions wine that Rebekah never prepared, only savory food. So where did the wine come from? The midrash answers that the angel Michael carried it down from Eden itself....
The verse says Isaac smelled the scent of Jacob's garments. The sages heard another word inside it: not begadav, his garments, but bogedav, his traitors. And so they told the stori...
When Isaac drew Jacob close and breathed in the scent of his garments, the sages say he was not smelling cloth at all. The Holy One, blessed be He, opened to him a vision of the fu...
The same verse about the scent of garments carried, for the sages, the fragrance of sinners brought back. They told it through Rabbi Zeira, a small man whose legs had been scorched...
Isaac's words, "may God give you of the dew of heaven," sound like a wish for good weather. The sages read them as the harvest of a life. Jacob, they say, looked at his own blessin...
The sages were not content to read Isaac's blessing only as fields and weather. They turned it toward the altar, hearing in each gift one of the offerings that Israel would one day...
Once more the sages turned Isaac's gifts away from the field and toward the study house. The dew of heaven they heard as Scripture, the written word descending from above. The fatn...
The sages found a rule of providence hidden in the order of Isaac's words. He curses the cursers first and blesses the blessers last. Why this sequence? Because it mirrors the live...
When Isaac learned that he had blessed Jacob in Esau's place, the verse says he trembled with a very great trembling. The sages weighed that word "great" and said it surpassed even...
The Sages catch a tremor in Esau's voice. When he cries out against his brother, they hear a man clearing his throat to spit out something bitter, dressing up his own loss as a cri...
When Esau accuses Jacob of fraud, the Sages turn the word inside out. Jacob did not come with trickery but with the wisdom of his Torah, and the blessing Esau begs for is only the ...
A wordless lesson opens this passage. The emperor Antoninus, his treasury empty, asks Rabbi for advice, and Rabbi answers in a garden instead of a letter. He pulls up the big radis...
How did Rebecca learn what Esau swore in his heart? The Sages answer that the matriarchs were prophetesses, and her knowledge ran deeper than ordinary sight. Where a farmer cuts a ...
A proverb the Sages quote says the rotten palm seeks out the orchard of barren trees, and they show that this folk wisdom is woven through the whole of Scripture and rabbinic teach...
Isaac blessed Jacob in trembling words, and the Sages show that heaven answered each one. Where Isaac asked for the dew of heaven, the prophets later promise that Jacob's remnant w...
Esau's descendants kept the covenant of circumcision while Isaac lived, the Sages teach, but the moment he died they cast it off. They tell a parable of a king who entrusted his cr...
The portion of Vayetze opens with Jacob walking out of Beersheba, and the Sages crowd around that single word, went out, to ask why it matters. Rabbi Pinchas reads him through Prov...
The Yalkut Shimoni, a compilation of rabbinic teachings, explores this very idea. It asks, "Why do we use a pseudonym and call the Holy One ‘place’ (makom)?" The answer it provides...
The night Jacob lay down at that place, the Divine Presence drew near and spoke to him like a parent leaning over a child. Twelve hours of darkness lay ahead, and each one, she sai...
When the Torah says Jacob "came upon the place," the sages heard the seed of the daily prayers. The patriarchs, they taught, fixed the times of prayer, and Rabbi Shmuel bar Nachman...
The angels in heaven cried out "the sun has come" the day young Joseph dreamed of sun, moon, and eleven stars bowing to him. How did this boy know, they wondered, that one of God's...
How many stones did Jacob gather at the place? The sages disagree, and each count carries a prophecy. Rabbi Yehudah says twelve, and Jacob set them as a test: if these separate sto...
Yalkut Shimoni on Torah turns to Esau's Vision. The verse says, "and he lay down in that place..." (Genesis 28:11). Simple enough. But Rabbi Yehudah sees something more: "Here he l...
The ladder Jacob saw was no slender thing leaned against a wall. The sages measured it at eight thousand parsangs across, reasoning from the verse: two angels going up, two coming ...
Bar Kappara held that every dream carries a meaning, and Jacob's ladder unfolds into two great pictures. Read one way, the ladder is the ramp of the Temple altar planted on the ear...
The same vision reads as a map of Israel's exiles. One teaching notes that the angels who escort a person inside the land of Israel are not the ones who escort him outside it, so "...
The chain of readings ends with one more figure climbing Jacob's ladder. Where the verse says "angels of God," this interpretation points to Daniel, drawn up alive from the den of ...
When the verse says the LORD stood over Jacob, the sages crowded around the word like scholars sharpening one another. One reads it through a thirsty psalm: my whole self longs for...
Why do we stand in prayer and recite eighteen blessings? The sages here trace the number back to Jacob's dream, where God names Himself as the God of the fathers. Count how many ti...
A poor man has been taken by the king as a favorite. He wanders in and out of the palace freely, without waiting for permission, and the courtiers seethe with envy. They plot to ki...
God promises Jacob that his children will be like the dust of the earth, and the sages turn that humble image over and over. Dust seems lowly, yet look closer. Dust only flourishes...
Within a single trembling exclamation of Jacob's, the sages hear the whole future of the holy mountain folded together. When he cries out at the awesomeness of the place, that word...
When Jacob takes the stone from beneath his head and sets it up, the sages turn it into the center of the world. With the heel of His right foot, God drives that stone down through...
Jacob lay his head on a stone and dreamed of a ladder, and the rabbis tell us those rungs were no ordinary steps. Each one was a kingdom climbing toward power. The angel-prince of ...
When Jacob spoke his vow at Beth-El, he became the first person in the Torah to bind himself to God with a vow, and the sages say that priority never left him. Long after, when Dav...
Aquilas the convert came to Rabbi Eliezer with a complaint that stung. The Torah promises the convert nothing grander than "bread and clothing." Was that the full measure of his re...
Word reached Jacob that his journey would end well, and the Torah says he "lifted up his feet" and went. The sages catch the strange phrasing. A man does not usually carry his feet...
The same well in Haran opens onto a second vision, and now the rabbis place it at the heart of Jerusalem. The well is Zion. The three flocks resting beside it are the three pilgrim...
A third reading turns Jacob's well into the supreme court of Israel. The well is still Zion, but now the three flocks resting beside it are the three courts of law that the traditi...
The well opens once more, and this reading carries the weight of history and hope together. Zion is the well, and the three flocks beside it are the first three empires that troubl...
For the final reading the rabbis bring the well down into the study hall itself. The well in the field is the Sanhedrin, the great court and academy of the sages. The three flocks ...
The rabbis turn a watering scene in Genesis into two mirrors. In the first, the well is the synagogue, the three flocks are the three called up to read, and the great stone over it...
