2,211 passages in Rabbinic Midrash
Individual passages from Yalkut Shimoni on Torah, shown in source order. Page 16 of 47.
Jacob sent Esau a plain inventory of his wealth: ox and donkey, flock, servant and maidservant. The simplest reading is exactly what it sounds like, a herdsman's tally. Rabbi Yehud...
The same ox and donkey now point to two of Jacob's own sons. The ox is Joseph, crowned with the firstling's majesty, and from his line would come Joshua, the grandson who would bre...
Jacob arranged his gift to Esau in waves, one drove of animals after another, and between each group he left a deliberate gap. The Torah calls it "a space between drove and drove" ...
God had promised Jacob, in plain words, "Behold, I am with you" (Genesis 28:15). And still, when Esau drew near, Jacob trembled. The midrash pairs him with Moses, the chosen one am...
Rabbi Yaakov bar Idi sets two verses against each other. God told Jacob, "I am with you and will keep you" (Genesis 28:15), an airtight guarantee of protection. So why does the ver...
Why does the Torah use two words, "afraid" and "distressed," for what seems like one emotion? The midrash splits them apart. Jacob was afraid that he might be killed, and distresse...
When Jacob opened his prayer with "O God of my father Abraham" (Genesis 32:10), the midrash notices that he names Abraham and Isaac but pointedly does not invoke Esau, who was just...
When Jacob stood at the edge of the Jordan, terrified of his brother Esau, he prayed with a strange phrase: "For with my staff I crossed this Jordan." The rabbis heard in those wor...
Jacob's plea to Heaven was sharper than it first appears. "Deliver me from the hand of my brother," he begged, naming the danger plainly. He feared Esau would come with raw force a...
Rabbi Levi gazed at Jacob's gift list and let out something close to awe. Comb through every nomad tent in the desert of Kedar, he said, and you will not turn up thirty nursing cam...
Every detail of Jacob's strategy carried intention. He handed the animals to his servants "every drove by itself," not jumbled together, so that the size of the gift would stun Esa...
Jacob ferried his family back and forth across the stream, the rabbis said, making his own body into a bridge, lifting from one bank and setting down on the other until everyone wa...
Some sages named the night wrestler outright: it was Michael, foremost of the princes of Heaven. Stunned, the angel cried that Jacob had overpowered a being of his rank, and yet th...
Why was Jacob left alone in the first place? Rabbi Eleazar offered a homely answer: he had gone back for some small jars, little containers worth almost nothing, and lingered to re...
When the angel saw he could not overpower Jacob, the rabbis put words in God's mouth that explain the failure. This man comes to you wearing five protective amulets - his own merit...
The night-wrestler at the Jabbok was not only a fighter; he was a creditor. He reminded Jacob of a vow made decades earlier at Bethel, when the frightened young man fleeing Esau ha...
Rabbi Ishmael taught that Jacob counted his sons backward, and when the count reached Levi, the boy was marked as holy to God. Then something remarkable happened above. Michael the...
When the wrestler begged, "Let me go, for the dawn has risen," the sages heard in his plea a window into the life of angels. Rabbi Yochanan taught that every morning God creates a ...
The angel's parting words honored Jacob with a new identity: you have striven with divine and human beings and have prevailed. The sages unfolded both halves of that claim. Jacob h...
A second reading of the angel's blessing turns it into a revelation about Jacob's stature. "You have striven with God" can mean: you are the one whose very likeness is engraved upo...
Scripture says the sun rose for Jacob as he left the river, and the sages asked the obvious question: did the sun not rise for everyone that morning? The answer is that it rose for...
The Torah ends the wrestling story with a law: the children of Israel do not eat the sinew of the thigh-vein, the gid hanasheh. The sages asked first about the name itself. Rabbi C...
Once the sinew is forbidden, a practical question follows: may an Israelite hand over a haunch of meat that still contains the gid hanasheh to a gentile neighbor? The Mishnah teach...
Out of one limp, an entire law was born. When the angel wrenched Jacob's thigh at daybreak, the sages tell us that injury became a commandment that would travel everywhere Israel w...
The koy was the puzzle animal of the ancient world, a creature the sages could not firmly place as either domestic beast or wild game. When a law hinges on category, a creature tha...
Rabbi Levi tells a fable to explain a moment of courage. The lion was furious with all the beasts, and they needed a clever envoy to soothe his rage. The fox volunteered, boasting ...
The seven bows turn out to carry two meanings. Beyond the verse about the righteous falling seven times, the sages hear Jacob saying something else to his brother. Picture yourself...
The midrash strips away any pretense of reconciliation. Esau, the sages say, had decided not to murder his brother with weapons of war. Bow and arrows were too crude. Instead he wo...
Two protections unfold in this passage, one tender and one terrible. As Esau approaches, each mother steps forward with her children to bow. But Joseph reverses the order, placing ...
When Esau finally says "keep what is yours, my brother," the sages hear more than politeness. Rabbi Eibo notes that Jacob had taken the blessings by stealth, and ever since they hu...
Jacob presses Esau to accept his gift with a pointed word. The verse says "my blessing that is brought to you," not "that I brought." Jacob means that everything he won came to him...
A simple man, no scholar, came to Rabbi Oshaya with a question shaped like a bargain. If the rabbi found his idea worth repeating, would he repeat it in public and credit the man w...
Rabbi Yehoshua ben Hananiah was standing in the imperial court when a heretic challenged him without a word. The man raised a gesture meant as an insult: here is a people whose Mas...
Jacob's words to Esau, "my lord knows that the children are tender," are read here as words spoken across the centuries. The tender children are the leaders Israel would need: Mose...
This brief reading lingers on the manner of God's walk through history. To the phrase about moving gently, it adds another image: with my face wrapped I go. The proof comes from an...
The conversation between Jacob and his lord keeps unfolding as a dialogue about unfinished business. Let my lord pass on ahead, comes the request, because there is still so much wo...
The chain of unfinished tasks reaches its furthest point. After the Tabernacle, after the Temple, after the faithful youths who refuse to bow, one work still remains above all the ...
Jacob looks down the corridor of the future and sees suffering coming to his descendants from Esau's. So he makes a calculated choice. Take the authority for now, he tells his brot...
Rabbi Abbahu raises a problem that has bothered close readers of the text. Jacob tells Esau he will follow him down to Seir, the heart of Esau's territory. Yet search the whole of ...
The Sages turned a single verse about Jacob into practical wisdom for living among hostile strangers. When you meet someone dangerous on the road and he asks where you are going, d...
When Esau offered to leave some of his men to escort Jacob on the road, Jacob declined. The Sages read that refusal as a lesson their own leader took to heart in a far more dangero...
Esau rode home to Seir, but his four hundred armed men quietly melted away one by one, each saying to himself that he had no wish to be scorched by Esau's burning hatred. The Sages...
Rav read three meanings into a single word: Jacob came whole in body, whole in wealth, and whole in Torah. Whole in body, though Scripture had just said he was limping. Whole in mo...
The Sages built a quiet legal claim out of Jacob's purchase. There are three places in the Land of Israel, they taught, that no nation can ever taunt as stolen property, because ea...
The portion opens with a rebuke. When Jacob built an altar and named it El, God of Israel, the Sages heard him claiming dominion, as if to say, I rule the lower world as God rules ...
A short passage with a startling claim. The Sages first settle a small matter of vocabulary. Rabbi Akiva, recalling his travels, reports that in Africa the common coin called a maa...
The Sages confront a hard verse. When Dinah is called the daughter of Leah, they hear an echo of the proverb in Ezekiel, as the mother, so the daughter. A cow does not gore, they s...
Why does the Torah pause to say that Dinah "went out"? The sages read it the way you would read a warning. Picture a man walking through a crowded street with an open cut of meat i...
