2,211 passages in Rabbinic Midrash
Individual passages from Yalkut Shimoni on Torah, shown in source order. Page 2 of 47.
A single verse names the waters Seas, and the sages turn it over to settle a question about ritual purity. The word for the gathered waters, mikveh, is the very word for the immers...
Rabbi Yose adds a fine point about the seas: their water purifies only while it flows, and it cannot be used for certain rites, not for one with a bodily flux, not for a leper, not...
The verse describing the earth covered in seeded grass and fruit-laden trees becomes the battleground for an ancient question: in what season did God create the world? Two sages li...
Rabbi Chanina bar Pappa unfolds a story hidden in a line from Psalms. On the third day of creation, God commanded the trees to grow each after its own kind, every species keeping t...
The third day of creation, the sages note, was the day of strong and mighty things, the day that would one day be linked to warriors and horsemen named in the prophets. It was also...
Scripture begins the fourth day strangely. "Let there be lights," God says, yet the word for lights is spelled short, almost as if it spelled the word for a curse. The sages notice...
Read the verse closely and a contradiction surfaces. Scripture first calls both luminaries "the two great lights," and then in the very same breath demotes one of them to "the less...
Ben Azzai presses the same contradiction and turns it into a courtroom drama between God and the moon. Both lamps were "great," the verse said, yet one is suddenly "lesser." So the...
A logic governs who keeps which clock. The great measure themselves by the great, the small by the small. So Esau, the midrash says, lives by the sun. Bright, dominant, lord of the...
The same chapter that shrank the moon now hands her an honor guard. "And the stars," Scripture adds almost in passing, and the sages catch the gift hidden there. Picture a king wit...
When Scripture says God "set" the lights in the sky, the sages hear a particular verb: the language of giving. The luminaries were not merely installed; they were handed to the wor...
The sages search the Bible for the man who could command the heavens, and they keep arriving at Joshua. Jacob blessed Ephraim that his "younger brother shall be greater" with seed ...
On the fifth day God tells the waters to teem with life, and a psalm supplies the wonder: "There is none like You among the gods, O LORD" (Psalms 86:8). The midrash makes the point...
A human king builds a grand palace. He fills the upper floors with tenants and the lower floors with tenants. But could he ever command someone to live in the empty space between t...
Why does the Torah demand ritual slaughter for cattle, a single cut for birds, but nothing at all for fish? The sages trace the answer back to the morning of creation. A beast was ...
When the Torah reports that on the fifth day "God created the great sea monsters" (Genesis 1:21), it uses a word so large that the sages knew ordinary fish could not be meant. Thes...
The creation account hides a string of marvels for those who read its spellings closely. The word for sea monsters appears in a form the sages took as singular, hinting at Leviatha...
When King Ptolemy gathered the Jewish elders to translate the Torah into Greek, he set them in separate rooms, expecting their versions to clash and expose the text as unreliable. ...
Before the world was made, the Holy One, blessed be He, brought a company of ministering angels into being and put a question to them: shall we make man? The angels answered with a...
Rabbi Yochanan noticed a pattern that runs through the whole Torah. Wherever a verse seems to hand ammunition to those who would deny the oneness of God, claiming the plural langua...
The Yalkut Shimoni, a compilation of rabbinic commentary on the Tanakh (the Hebrew Bible), shares this fascinating perspective. It recounts a dialogue between God and the Torah bef...
The Torah's plural, "Let us make man," set the sages searching for God's hidden conversation partner. Some said He consulted the works of heaven and earth, like a king who does not...
Heretics walked into Rabbi Simlai's study and tried to trap him. How many gods, they asked, did it take to create the world? The plural verb in Scripture, "Let us make man," surely...
God's blessing to the first humans included a single Hebrew word that the rabbis heard two ways at once. Read one way it means "rule"; read another it means "be brought down." The ...
Rav taught something startling about Eden. The first man was a vegetarian, not by choice but by command. When God handed over the plants "for food," the verse pointedly listed the ...
Rabbi Banaah had a strange and holy job: measuring the burial caves of the righteous so passersby would not stumble onto them and contract impurity. His work led him to the most fa...
Why did God begin the human race with one man instead of a whole crowd? The rabbis answer in a series of lessons, and the first is the most famous. Because Adam stood alone, a sing...
The sages keep pressing the question of why God started humanity from a single man, and each answer exposes something about human nature. One reason: family pride. Had God created ...
The rabbis add one last reason that the human being was created alone, and last, on the sixth day. It is a remedy aimed straight at the most stubborn human weakness: pride. Suppose...
Why was Adam created last, on the very eve of Shabbat? So that he could step at once into a commandment, and at once into a feast. The sages tell a parable. A king built a palace a...
When the Torah says that God created the man "in His image," the sages heard something startling: Adam came into the world already complete, born circumcised, with nothing lacking ...
The Torah says God made humanity "male and female," and Rabbi Yitzchak listens to the Hebrew word for male, zachar, until it begins to echo other words. He hears in it kar, a loaf,...
Readers of Genesis have long stumbled over a puzzle: chapter one announces that God created the human, and then chapter two seems to start the story over, forming a man from the du...
Reading the Torah's first command to be fruitful and multiply, Bar Kappara mines the days of creation week to settle a practical question of Jewish life: when should a wedding take...
The sages preserved more than one version of how the days of creation govern weddings, and this brief passage records an alternate wording of the tradition. Here a virgin marries o...
The Torah's blessing "be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth and subdue it" raises a legal question for the sages: on whom does the duty actually fall? Their answer is that the o...
The sages settle the disputed law, then tell two human stories that test it. Rav Yosef anchors the ruling in a verse where God tells Jacob alone to be fruitful and multiply, the co...
A couple in Sidon had been married ten years without a child, and the husband resolved to divorce his wife. They brought the matter to Rabbi Shimon ben Yochai, who would not let th...
Rabbi Abbahu pictured the very first wedding and saw the Holy One, blessed be He, standing in the role we would expect of a friend, not a distant ruler. He lifted a cup of blessing...
Reading the words "very good" at the close of creation, the sages heard more than satisfaction. They imagined the Holy One, blessed be He, building worlds and tearing them down, ag...
The sages would not let the word "very" sit quietly. They turned it over and discovered that everything Scripture calls "very good" includes the things we would never call good at ...
Resh Lakish fastened on a small grammatical oddity: "the sixth day" carries a definite article the earlier days lack. From that single letter he drew a vast claim about why the uni...
What does it mean that heaven and earth were "finished"? The sages reached for an image from the bathhouse. Picture a basin brimming with water, and resting at its bottom two finel...
The word the Torah uses for creation being finished, vayechulu, can also be heard as a word for striking or wearing down, the way a king honors a province by easing its burdens. Fr...
The closing words of the creation account, "the heavens and the earth were finished and all their host," became in the sages' hands a doorway into Sabbath itself. They counted thre...
The sages debated exactly when the Sabbath prayer may be said, trading cases the way lawyers trade precedents. Rabbi Yishmael recalled his father praying the Sabbath service on Fri...
A king builds a wedding canopy. He plasters the walls, panels the ceiling, paints every surface until it gleams. Then he stops and looks. Something is missing. The canopy is beauti...
A single verse from Proverbs gets pinned to the seventh day: "The blessing of the LORD, it makes rich, and He adds no sorrow with it" (Proverbs 10:22). The sages read the first hal...
