2,211 passages in Rabbinic Midrash
Individual passages from Yalkut Shimoni on Torah, shown in source order. Page 17 of 47.
Simeon and Levi were thirteen years old when they walked into Shechem with swords. The midrash lingers on a small grammatical oddity: the verse names them as "the sons of Jacob," w...
God's call to Jacob is blunt. Arise, go up to Bethel and build the altar you promised when you were running for your life from Esau. The midrash turns this into a lesson about the ...
When God appears to Jacob a second time, the sages reach for a measure of how astonishing this is. Consider, they say, the ordinary worshipper who simply builds an altar of plain e...
The blessing "be fruitful and multiply" is read forward into history. The promised nation, congregation of nations, and kings are mapped onto Benjamin, onto Ephraim and Manasseh, a...
The Torah lists Reuben at the head of Leah's sons, and the sages pile crown upon crown on him: firstborn in birth, in inheritance, in prophecy, and, most striking, firstborn in rep...
The two brothers sit down to divide their inheritance, and Esau, certain of his advantage as the elder, demands the right to choose first. Jacob reads him perfectly. This wicked ma...
Anah, a descendant of Esau, earns Scripture's notice for breeding mules in the wilderness, crossing a horse with a donkey to produce a creature that cannot reproduce itself. The mi...
The Torah calls the sons of Seir "the inhabitants of the land," and the sages press on the phrase. Was everyone else living up in the sky? Of course not. The point, they explain, i...
A bitter legal fight runs beneath this passage. The Sadducees argued that a man's daughter should split the estate with his granddaughter through a son. The sages of the tradition ...
The Torah lists the kings of Edom who reigned before any king ruled in Israel, and the sages read the roster as a map of empire. Rabbi Yitzchak compares the nations to a ship cobbl...
Why does Genesis say so plainly that Jacob settled down in the land where his father had wandered? The sages hear a warning in the word. Esau, the wicked one, fled into exile thoug...
Genesis says Jacob settled in the land of his father's sojournings, but the sages hear the word megurim as megayyerei, "the converts of his father." Abraham and Jacob both drew sou...
Joseph was seventeen, yet the Torah calls him a youth. The sages catch the redundancy and read it as character: he acted like a vain boy, fussing with his eyes, fixing his hair, li...
A single tight line of midrash binds Joseph's coat to the great miracle at the Red Sea. The psalm invites us, "Come and see the works of God," and immediately declares, "He turned ...
Rav draws a hard lesson from a small thing. Over a mere two selas' weight of fine wool that Jacob added to Joseph's coat, the brothers' jealousy caught fire, and the matter rolled ...
When Joseph told his dreams and his brothers' hatred deepened, Scripture says his father "kept the matter." The sages picture Jacob taking up a pen and writing down the exact day, ...
Joseph is wandering in a field, lost, looking for his brothers, when a stranger finds him and points the way. To plain eyes it is a chance encounter, an anonymous man who happens t...
The brothers see Joseph approaching and their hatred turns murderous. Let us set the dogs on him, some say. There comes the master of dreams, they sneer, certain that this boy mean...
The brothers tear the famous coat from Joseph layer by layer, and then they throw him into a pit. The rabbis name Simeon as the one who flung him down, and they pause on a bitter s...
The brothers dip Joseph's coat in goat's blood and send it to their father with two cold words: Recognize now. They will not even say the coat is Joseph's; they make the grieving o...
The bloodstained coat reaches Jacob and he knows it at once. A wild beast has devoured my son, he cries. Yet even in his grief a spark of the Holy Spirit flickers, for the rabbis h...
Beneath Jacob's refusal to be comforted lies a grief larger than one lost son. He had set himself, against every obstacle, to build a family of twelve, and now he believed the whol...
When Scripture says his father wept for him, the plain sense points to Jacob, but the rabbis catch a second father in the verse: Isaac, Joseph's grandfather, still living. Isaac kn...
The Torah sets two journeys side by side. Joseph is dragged down to Egypt, and at that very moment Judah "goes down" from his brothers. The sages refused to read this as coincidenc...
The sages return to Joseph's burial with a striking demand placed in Joseph's own mouth. As he lay dying he made his brothers swear an oath, and the midrash hears in it more than a...
One word in the verse troubled the sages: the Torah says Judah married "the daughter of a Canaanite man." Read plainly, that is a scandal. The whole arc of the patriarchs runs agai...
The sages read meaning into every name Judah's household gave its children. Er, they say, was a boy stirred away from the world before his time. Onan brought mourning, anan, upon h...
The Torah says Tamar sat at the entrance of Enaim, and the sages turn the place name into a window. The word means "eyes," so they hear that she sat at the doorway of Abraham, the ...
The sages first read the encounter as a warning. A man must keep his guard up even around his own relatives, lest he stumble. Judah, they note, did not even recognize Tamar precise...
The midrash hears the Torah itself laughing here, in the verse from Proverbs that pictures wisdom "playing" before the world. The play is exact justice. Long ago Judah and his brot...
This short teaching closes the cycle with one unforgettable image. Rabbi Chama, in the name of Rabbi Yose, first softens the legal point about the three months. It need not mean th...
The Sages set two acts of immorality side by side and drew opposite conclusions from them. Tamar acted, and from her line came kings and prophets, an entire royal house leading to ...
Rabbi Meir's tradition makes Tamar the daughter of Shem, son of Noah, and that lineage changes everything. A priest's daughter who profanes herself is condemned to burning, so the ...
A teacher recited before Rav Nachman a piercing equation: humiliating someone in public is a form of bloodshed. Rav Nachman approved and gave the proof anyone can watch on a face. ...
Mar Ukva dropped four zuz into a poor man's doorpost every single day and never let the man see his face. One evening, curious to thank his benefactor, the poor man followed him. T...
Rabbi Elazar marked three courtrooms where, he taught, the holy spirit broke into human judgment. The first was Judah's, called the court of Shem. When Judah declared "she is more ...
The Torah notes a small, vivid detail in Tamar's delivery: as she labored, one of the twins thrust out a hand before withdrawing it. Rav Huna treats this as a teaching case in the ...
The birth of the twins is read as a window onto the whole future. The fuller spelling of the word "twins" becomes a hook for a teaching about trusted testimony: three witnesses are...
The verse "Joseph was brought down to Egypt" is read as a single thread running through his whole story. The Sages weave it together with a line from Hosea, "with cords of a man I ...
The Torah says Joseph "was brought down" to Egypt, but the sages hear a second voice in the very same letters. Read it another way and it says Joseph brought others down. The proud...
Scripture says the Lord inclined kindness toward Joseph, a phrase never used even for Abraham, who passed ten trials. Why the difference? A king had two friends. One, starving, sto...
She relentlessly pursued him, but he resisted. But the Yalkut Shimoni, that incredible compilation of Midrashic (rabbinic interpretive commentary) interpretations, gives us a glimp...
Rav Kahana taught a striking measure of reward. Joseph sanctified God's name quietly, in a closed room where no one watched, and for that a single letter of the divine Name was wov...
One short verse says Joseph "came into the house to do his work," and the plain reading suggests ordinary chores. Rabbi Eliezer hears something else. He links the word "work" to th...
The sages debate what kept Joseph in the house on the day of his great trial. Rabbi Yehudah says it was the festival of the rising Nile, and while all Egypt went to watch the river...
When Potiphar's wife seized his garment, Joseph fled outside, and the sages hear in that flight an echo across centuries. He escaped, they say, on the strength of his ancestors' me...
Scripture says the prison warden saw nothing amiss in anything under Joseph's hand, because the Lord was with him. The sages press on the wording. This verse describes Joseph at hi...
When two of Pharaoh's officers sinned, the sages ask why their downfall came just then. The answer is providence working through small accidents. A fly in the cupbearer's goblet, a...
