2,211 passages in Rabbinic Midrash
Individual passages from Yalkut Shimoni on Torah, shown in source order. Page 19 of 47.
The book of Exodus opens with a list of names, and the sages hear in it the verse, "As is Your name, O God, so is Your praise." A human king is flattered as a mighty warrior when h...
The Torah opens the book of bondage with a quiet boast about family. "These are the names of the sons of Israel who came into Egypt, Jacob and his sons" (Exodus 1:1), and the sages...
The verse names the sons of Israel who came into Egypt, and the sages ask a sharp question. Isaac and Ishmael were brothers. Jacob and Esau were brothers. Why was it Jacob's line t...
When the book of Exodus lists the tribes, it repeats names already recorded elsewhere, and the sages ask why the same roll call appears again and again. They answer with the image ...
The sages return to the puzzle of why the tribes are listed in a shifting order, and they offer a builder's answer. Israel, they say, is the roof of the world. Anyone who has laid ...
The verse tells that seventy souls of Jacob's house came into Egypt, and then it records a death, "And Joseph died, and all his brothers" (Exodus 1:6). The sages turn this roll of ...
After Joseph and all his brothers died, the verse delivers an astonishing line, "And the children of Israel were fruitful and swarmed" (Exodus 1:7). The sages seize on that word, s...
Israel had grown so numerous that they crowded the theaters and the circuses of Egypt, and at once the Egyptians decreed that the Hebrews must keep apart. Then comes the verse that...
Rav and Samuel debate the new king once more. One holds he was literally a new king, since Scripture says "new." The other holds that only his decrees were new, since the text neve...
Pharaoh gathered his counselors and chose his words with strange care. "Come, let us deal wisely with him," he said, speaking of Israel as a single him rather than a them. The sage...
When the verse says the taskmasters were set "over him," the sages refused to read it as a mere slip of grammar. They pictured a brick-mold hung around Pharaoh's own neck. When an ...
It wasn't just about Pharaoh's decree to throw baby boys into the Nile. It was also about something seemingly mundane: bricks. to a fascinating interpretation from the Yalkut Shimo...
Pharaoh broke the men of Israel in the fields and counted on the breaking. But Rabbi Akiva taught that the redemption was already being seeded, and the seeds were the women. When t...
One hundred and thirty years after Jacob's family came down to Egypt, Pharaoh fell asleep on his throne and met a stranger in his sleep. An old man stood before him holding a merch...
Scripture gives the two Hebrew midwives names, Shiphrah and Puah, but the rabbis insisted these were not strangers. Rav and Shmuel debated who stood behind the names. One held they...
The sages return to the midwives' names and find a second meaning folded into the first. Shiphrah, they say, may also recall that Israel was fruitful and multiplied in her days, he...
The rabbis offer one more reading of the name Puah, and this one turns the young midwife into a prophet. The word for her cooing can also mean to cry out or call aloud, and here th...
The sages give a final, tender meaning to Miriam's name Puah. The same word that meant cooing over a baby and crying out in prophecy can also mean weeping aloud, and here the rabbi...
Pharaoh gave the midwives detailed instructions and a way to read the moment of birth. He compared a woman in labor to a potter at his wheel, with the two stone supports on either ...
The Torah says the midwives kept the children alive, and the rabbis note that they did far more than simply spare them. They actively supplied the hidden Hebrew babies with water a...
The Torah says that because the Hebrew midwives feared God and refused Pharaoh's order to kill the newborn boys, God "made them houses." But what does that strange phrase mean? The...
Yocheved's reward for fearing God was Moses and Aaron, priesthood and kingship together. And Miriam's reward? The sages answer in a single word: wisdom. From her line came Bezalel,...
When the Torah says "a man went from the house of Levi," the sages ask where he went, and answer that Amram, the leading man of his generation, went where his daughter's counsel le...
The Torah commands that every Hebrew boy be thrown into the Nile, but Rabbi Shila refuses to let the story end in drowning. He teaches that the river itself rebelled against Pharao...
The verse says Yocheved "conceived and bore a son," yet the sages note she had been pregnant for three months already. They read the words to mean that her labor was as painless as...
The Torah says Yocheved "could no longer hide" her son, and the sages explain the cruel game that made concealment impossible. Whenever the Egyptians suspected a Hebrew baby was hi...
The Torah says the ark was placed "among the reeds," and the sages debate whether that means the Red Sea or a marsh, hearing in the word the same reeds Isaiah said would wither. Th...
Scripture calls Miriam "the prophetess, the sister of Aaron," and the sages press on the strange phrasing: why the sister of Aaron and not of Moses, who was the more famous brother...
A law older than any courtroom holds that the measure you use on others is the measure used on you. The rabbis read it first in cruelty and then, surprisingly, in kindness. When ba...
Pharaoh's daughter did not come to the Nile for a baby. She came for relief. Her body was covered in painful sores, so raw that warm water tormented her, and only the cool current ...
The plagues had not yet come, but the rabbis paint Egypt already broiling. Heaven sent a scorching wind and a sun that burned flesh like the worst heat of midsummer, and it was thi...
A single line, almost a whisper in the margin. The verse describes "a weeping boy" beside the basket, and one tradition reads the tears as belonging not to the infant in the water ...
Who was the "weeping boy" beside the basket? One sage says it was an angel, for Scripture sometimes calls an angel a na'ar, a youth. From the first moment of his life, Moses travel...
How did Pharaoh's daughter know the baby was a Hebrew? She saw he was circumcised, and the rabbis say she prophesied without realizing it: "This one falls, but no other falls." Tha...
The Torah gives the prophet one name. The midrash gives him many. His mother called him Yekutiel, from her hope; his father called him Chaver, because the boy reunited a couided ho...
When Moses saw an Egyptian taskmaster beating a fellow Hebrew, the midrash says he did not strike with a fist but with a word, cursing the man with the Divine Name and killing him,...
The verse seems to record a small thing: Moses looks both ways, sees no one watching, and strikes down the Egyptian who is beating a Hebrew slave. The sages refuse to let it stay s...
The midrash opens with a riddle. Why did Moses pour himself into setting apart cities of refuge, even cities east of the Jordan that he would never reach? Rabbi Levi answers with a...
A single terse line, and the sages turn the ordinary phrase "this way and that" into a heavenly courtroom. When the verse says Moses "turned this way and that," it is not describin...
The same small word, "thus," opens onto a complaint that reaches all the way back to the covenant. When Moses turned "this way and that," the sages hear him turning toward heaven w...
The sages keep turning the word "thus" over in their hands, and now it becomes Moses' worry about Sinai. If the people are this depraved, to whom will God ever say "Thus shall you ...
The Torah simply notes that Moses fled. The sages read his flight as strategy, even wisdom, and they anchor it in a verse from Isaiah: "Go, my people, enter your chambers." There a...
Moses learned kingship before he learned prophecy. In this Yalkut Shimoni excerpt, Moses flees Egypt at eighteen and reaches the army of Konkos, king of Kush. The city has rebelled...
Exodus introduces the priest of Midian almost in passing, the father of seven daughters who will draw water and meet a fugitive at the well. The sages stop on the man himself, beca...
Names in the Torah are not fixed labels but ledgers, and the sages read a single added or missing letter as a verdict on a life. Jethro began as plain Yeter. When his good deeds ac...
How many names can one man carry? The sages count them like a man turning a gem in the light, each facet a different reading of who Moses' father-in-law truly was. Scripture calls ...
The daughters of the priest of Midian came to the well as they always did, and as always the rough shepherds drove them off. This time the shepherds went further. They threw the wo...
Jewish tradition certainly does. to a fascinating exploration from the Yalkut Shimoni on Torah, specifically section 169, where we uncover layers of meaning in the story of Moses a...
