2,211 passages in Rabbinic Midrash
Individual passages from Yalkut Shimoni on Torah, shown in source order. Page 21 of 47.
A human king guards his prerogatives jealously. No one else sits on his throne, rides his horse, holds his scepter, wears his crown or his royal robe, or dares to bear his title. T...
Why did God specifically make Moses "a god to Pharaoh"? Because Pharaoh had crowned himself one. He boasted through the prophet's mouth, "My river is my own, and I made myself," cl...
The midrash plays on Pharaoh's other name, Hophra, hearing in it the verb "to uncover," the same word used when the priest uncovers the head of the suspected woman. The hint is sha...
The same title that elevated Moses carried a warning inside it. God had just called him "a god to Pharaoh," an extraordinary honor. But honor is exactly where a person stumbles. So...
When the LORD sent Moses and Aaron before Pharaoh, He warned them that the king would demand a sign. So Aaron threw down his staff, and it became a serpent. Pharaoh did not tremble...
Pharaoh's demand for a wonder can be heard another way. The Holy One, blessed be He, was not merely answering a tyrant's challenge. He was looking past the throne room toward the m...
The way the verse speaks of Pharaoh hints at the hardness of the encounter. The word for his speaking carries an edge, the same harsh tone Scripture used when Joseph's brothers sai...
Pharaoh loved to call himself the great crocodile of the Nile, the beast no one could touch. So the Holy One, blessed be He, gave Moses a message shaped to that pride. Look at this...
When Pharaoh's magicians matched the early signs with their own arts, the sages paused to weigh what sorcery really is. Abaye compared its laws to the categories of Sabbath labor. ...
When Aaron's staff swallowed the staffs of the magicians, Rabbi Elazar saw two wonders folded into one. The staff had already become a serpent; now, returned to wood, it devoured t...
The plagues did not fall at random. The sages read them as a campaign waged with the precision of a king putting down a rebellion, and as justice measured exactly to Egypt's crimes...
Theudas of Rome drew a startling lesson from the plague of frogs. He asked what gave Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah the courage to walk into Nebuchadnezzar's fiery furnace rather t...
When the magicians of Egypt watched the dust turn to lice and could not copy the wonder, they finally broke. "This is the finger of God," they admitted (Exodus 8:15). The sages ask...
How did frogs overrun all of Egypt? Rabbi Akiva taught that it began with one frog that bred until its spawn filled the land. Rabbi Eleazar ben Azariah dismissed the reading with a...
The verse says the ash that Moses threw toward heaven would become dust over all the land of Egypt (Exodus 9:9). The sages drew a lesson from the lighter case to the heavier. If du...
A skin disease that fell on Egypt became, generations later, a fine point of sacrificial law. The Rabbis taught that an animal with garav, a scab, or chazazit, a lichen-like rash, ...
The very tricks that had once let Pharaoh's magicians mimic Moses turned against their own bodies. Scripture says that when the boils came, the magicians could not stand before Mos...
Why did Pharaoh survive the night the firstborn died? The midrash reads the warning "from the firstborn of Pharaoh" (Exodus 11:5) twice over. Since his son is named elsewhere as th...
The Torah says some Egyptians feared the word of the LORD and brought their cattle indoors before the hail (Exodus 9:20). Rabbi Shimon ben Yochai refused to praise them. "The best ...
When the hail flattened Egypt's crops, the wheat and the spelt alone survived, and the Torah explains it with the puzzling word afilot (Exodus 9:32). Rabbi Judah guessed it meant t...
The sages read a hidden word inside the hailstones of Egypt. They called them elgavish, and they heard in it the phrase "upon the back of a man." These stones, they said, knew when...
The psalm cries out, "How awesome are Your works." Rabbi Eliezer the son of Rabbi Yose the Galilean rephrases it as the praise a craftsman earns from those who watch him work: well...
Starting from the strange phrase that the locusts "covered the eye of the land," Resh Lakish builds a sweeping picture: the earth is shaped like a human being. Whatever the Holy On...
The Rabbis refuse to let the plague of darkness be ordinary nightfall. The psalm says God "sent darkness and made it dark," and they hear a doubling in those words. Like a king who...
One small word carries the weight of this teaching. When God tells Moses to instruct Israel to ask the Egyptians for silver and gold, the verse uses the word na, which the Rabbis i...
Why did Moses say the firstborn would die "about midnight" instead of naming the hour exactly? The Rabbis cannot believe God spoke vaguely, since there is no doubt in heaven. So th...
It turns out, that feeling is ancient, and our tradition has some pretty pointed wisdom about it. The Yalkut Shimoni is a compilation of midrashim (rabbinic interpretive commentary...
One phrase in the verse, "in the land of Egypt," sets the Rabbis thinking about where God chooses to speak. They prove that even in Egypt the divine word reached Moses only outside...
The very first commandment given to Israel as a nation is to fix the calendar by sighting the new moon. Rabbi Yitzchak famously says the Torah might have begun right here, with "Th...
King Hezekiah faced a calendar crisis. The springtime feast was slipping out of season, and he wanted Passover to fall in its proper month. So he added a leap month, but he did it ...
The first commandment given to Israel as a people was not about food or worship. It was about time. "This month shall be for you the head of months" (Exodus 12:2). According to Rab...
Why must Passover always land in spring? Because the Torah commands, "Guard the month of spring" (Deuteronomy 16:1), and the sages read it as a double watch: guard Passover for the...
What does it mean that God set Israel apart? Rabbi Levi reads the verse with surgical attention. The Torah does not say God separated the nations away from Israel, which would have...
The book of Song of Songs sings, "The voice of my beloved! Behold, it comes, leaping upon the mountains" (Song of Songs 2:8). Rabbi Yehudah hears in that beloved voice the voice of...
How precious is the gift of the calendar? Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi tells of a king whose son was taken captive. The king put on the garments of vengeance, fought to free his child, ...
In a fascinating passage in, Yalkut Shimoni on Torah 191, even the angels were curious! That Rabi Pinchas and Rabi Chilkiyah, quoting Rabi Simon, relate that the ministering angels...
Why does Israel reckon by the moon rather than the sun? Rabbi Yehudah son of Rabbi Ilai offers a homely rule: the great measure themselves by the great, the small by the small. Esa...
God told Israel, "This month is handed into your hands, and you are not handed into its hand." To prove time serves Israel and not the reverse, the sages tell of Rabbi Hiyya the Gr...
Read the opening verse with a careful ear and a puzzle surfaces. God tells Moses and Aaron together to speak to all Israel, yet elsewhere only Moses receives the command to speak. ...
The verse says "let them take" the lamb, in the plural, yet obviously not every Israelite reaches out and grabs the same animal. From this small strangeness the sages draw one of t...
What counts as the right animal, and who shares it? Two small words in the verse decide a great deal. First, the word for "lamb" is read generously. It covers both a young goat and...
If each household has its own lamb, who exactly can the head of the house include without asking? The law draws a sharp line around consent. A father may bring and slaughter the Pa...
What happens when a single household is simply too small to finish a whole lamb? The Torah anticipates the problem and the sages turn it into a study of timing and intention. Peopl...
The verse pairs "he and his neighbor," and the early sages mine both halves. Rabbi Akiva fastens on the single word "he" and rules that a person who wishes may keep the Passover en...
Is a woman counted in her own right for the Passover offering, or only folded into a group with others? The early sages do not agree, and their dispute is preserved with care. Rabb...
The phrase "according to the number of souls" looks like a simple instruction to count heads, but the sages hear it doing two jobs at once, one expanding the circle and one drawing...
How carefully the Torah describes the creature chosen for the first Passover. A lamb, it says, but the word it uses can mean either a young sheep or a kid of the goats. Without ble...
It is not enough that the Passover lamb be perfect when the knife touches it. The sages read a single word, "shall be," and heard in it a demand that stretches across the whole rit...
