2,211 passages in Rabbinic Midrash
Individual passages from Yalkut Shimoni on Torah, shown in source order. Page 20 of 47.
Before Jethro would give his daughter, he set a price, and it was a strange one. The first son must be given to idolatry, and only the children after him raised for Heaven. Moses a...
How does Heaven decide whom to entrust with a nation? Not by examining a man at prayer or at study, but by watching him in a field with animals who cannot speak for themselves. Rab...
The wilderness looks like the place where nothing grows, yet the sages read it as the source of everything Israel would treasure. Moses, leading his flock toward Horeb, was being s...
Sometimes a sign carries a warning folded inside a promise. The phrase "the far side of the wilderness" sounded to the sages like more than a direction. It hinted to Moses that his...
Of all the trees God could have chosen, why a thornbush, the lowliest and most painful plant in the field? The midrash gives an answer that turns the choice into an act of love. Th...
The names of the mountain hold a warning and the bush holds a promise. Horeb sounds like the word for sword, for from there judgment would fall on the nations that refused the Tora...
Listen to how the Holy One, blessed be He, called out from the burning bush. He did not say the name once. He said it twice: "Moses, Moses." And this was no accident of speech, no ...
The doubled name held another secret. "He was Moses before God spoke with him, and he was the same Moses after." Prophecy did not swell his head. The man who heard the voice of the...
When the voice first came from the bush, it came gently and in a sound Moses already loved: the voice of his own father, Amram. The Holy One, blessed be He, spoke this way on purpo...
Why a thornbush? Of all the places to appear, God chose the lowliest scrub in the wilderness, all thorns and thistles, a tangle of trouble. The midrash answers with tenderness: He ...
"Take this staff in your hand." With that plain command came a sharp word and a generous one. The sharp word: if you will not do My errand, this rod will do My errand. God does not...
How carefully the sages guarded the holiest Name. Rav Yochanan taught that the four-letter Name was handed from master to student only rarely, once a week by one count, once in sev...
God's promise to teach Moses can be read a second way. The Hebrew word for "I will teach you" shares its root with the language of shooting an arrow, the very word used for an arro...
"Go and gather the elders of Israel." From this small instruction the sages drew a sweeping principle: the Holy One, blessed be He, honors the elders not once or twice but everywhe...
The midrash pauses over a single, almost throwaway verse in the Exodus narrative, where the Holy One, blessed be He, tells Moses that the women of Israel will ask their Egyptian ne...
The sages keep mining the verse about borrowing silver from Egyptian neighbors, and from it they build a fuller catalog of how Israel preserved its identity under slavery. The borr...
A single short comment links two distant verses across the generations. When Moses and Aaron stand before Pharaoh, they speak in the name of the God of the Hebrews (Exodus 5:3). Th...
At the burning bush Moses protests that the people "will not believe me," and the sages refuse to let that line pass as humble caution. Resh Lakish reads it as an accusation agains...
Moses begins his mission with an apology about his own mouth: "I am not a man of words" (Exodus 4:10). The midrash watches what happens to that mouth over the course of his life an...
The sages explain Moses' self-doubt with a parable. A merchant walks the street crying "Here is purple!", the rarest and most royal of dyes. The king hears him, summons him, and as...
When Moses pleads at the bush, "Send by the hand of whomever You will send" (Exodus 4:13), the midrash refuses the easy reading that he was simply ducking the mission. He was honor...
The verse says God's anger was kindled against Moses (Exodus 4:14), and the sages ask what that anger actually cost him. Rabbi Yehoshua ben Korcha holds that every flare of divine ...
When the LORD told Moses, "I will be with your mouth, and I will instruct you," the sages caught a doubling in the words. One promise covers speech: an open mouth, a ready tongue. ...
The staff God told Moses to take was no ordinary shepherd's rod. The sages traced its lineage all the way back to the sixth day of creation, fashioned at twilight before the first ...
Scripture says the word came to Moses "in Midian," and the sages asked why the location matters. Rav Nachman read it as a directive: in Midian you had bound yourself by a vow, so g...
Hidden in a single small preposition, the sages found a quiet teaching about partings. When Jethro sent Moses off, he said, "Go to peace." Not "go in peace," which sounds nearly th...
As Moses set out toward Egypt with his wife and sons, God told Aaron to go meet his brother in the wilderness. Aaron rushed out and threw his arms around him, kissing him after the...
The verse "God thunders marvelously with His voice" gave the sages a way to picture something genuinely strange. When God sent Moses from Midian with the words "Return to Egypt," t...
Moses and Aaron gathered the elders of Israel and delivered God's message with a phrase the people had been taught to recognize: "I have surely remembered you." That doubled word w...
The day Moses and Aaron came to demand Israel's freedom happened to be Pharaoh's coronation festival. Kings from across the world were arriving to crown the great world-ruler, each...
Three men and a band of elders stood outside the palace of the most powerful king on earth, and they froze. Pharaoh's fortress had four hundred gates, a hundred facing each directi...
The mouth that mocks can also be the mouth that confesses. Pharaoh had jeered, "Who is the LORD?" Yet the sages teach that the same proud tongue would one day cry out, "Who is like...
The tribe of Levi had been spared the forced labor that crushed the rest of Israel, and Pharaoh resented their freedom. "You only ask to go and worship because you have time on you...
The first sign of deliverance felt instead like betrayal. As Moses and Aaron left Pharaoh's court, two men stood waiting for them, Dathan and Abiram, the same pair who would later ...
At the entrance to Pharaoh's house crouched two young lions, bound in iron chains, so fierce that no one passed in or out except by the king's express word. Only trained handlers c...
Why did Moses lead Israel for forty years yet never wear a crown? Ulla taught that Moses actually asked for kingship at the burning bush and was turned down. The proof lies in a si...
The portion of Va'era opens with a charged verse: "And God spoke to Moses and said to him, I am the LORD." The sages noticed that two divine names appear in a single breath, and th...
Rabbi Elazar son of Rabbi Yose told of a strange encounter in Alexandria. An old Egyptian led him out and gloated, "Come, I will show you what my ancestors did to yours." Some they...
God reminds Moses of a strange thing. The patriarchs, Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, walked with the Holy One across whole lifetimes, yet they never received the full secret of the D...
The rabbis notice a quiet pattern in how Scripture orders names and deeds. Of the wicked, the verse often tells the deed first and names the man afterward, as if the person trails ...
Three promises sit in this passage, and the rabbis read each as a hinge of history. "I will bring you out from under the burdens of Egypt" is tied, by a shared word for burden, to ...
A single word in God's promise becomes a doorway into the blessing every Jew says over bread. The verse calls God the one "who brings you out" of Egypt, using the word hamotzi, and...
Moses, it turns out, was not a man who prayed and then waited quietly. Rabbi Elazar ben Azariah finds four moments where Moses pressed God for a yes or no and refused to let go unt...
When God hands Moses and Aaron their commission over Israel, the rabbis hear something blunt and almost startling in the words "gave them a charge." This is no ordinary appointment...
The charge God gives Moses and Aaron, the rabbis say, had two faces. The first was a command to break with idolatry. Rabbi Yehudah ben Beteira presses a sharp question on the verse...
A single verse about Aaron's wife becomes a lesson in whom to marry. Rabbi Elazar lays down the principle: a person should always attach himself to good people. He proves it by com...
The Torah seems to contradict itself. One verse says the LORD spoke "to Moses and to Aaron in the land of Egypt," and another says simply that the LORD spoke "to Moses." Which was ...
When God told Moses, "See, I have made you a god to Pharaoh," the appointment landed on Moses by name. He was to stand over the most powerful man on earth as a kind of judge, unbow...
