2,211 passages in Rabbinic Midrash
Individual passages from Yalkut Shimoni on Torah, shown in source order. Page 22 of 47.
Why did God tell Israel to take the lamb on the tenth of the month but not slaughter it until the fourteenth? Four days of waiting, of keeping a marked animal in the house. The sag...
The command to keep the lamb four days was not only a one-time act in Egypt. The sages caught a shared word between two laws. The Torah says to "keep" the Passover lamb, and it als...
"And they shall slaughter it," says the verse, speaking of the whole assembly of Israel. But surely not every hand can hold the knife to one lamb. The sages drew from this a princi...
When exactly is "between the evenings"? The sages stacked verse upon verse to pin the hour down. Not at the first fading of sunlight, not after full dark, but in the long afternoon...
Where may the Passover lamb be eaten, and with whom? The Torah speaks of "the houses in which they shall eat it," and the sages mined the plural and the singular for law. From one ...
The command is to eat the flesh of the lamb, and the sages first marked what "flesh" excludes. Not the sinews, not the bones, not the horns or the hooves, only the meat itself coun...
When does the night of the Pesach offering truly end? Two giants of the Mishnah lock horns over a single phrase. Rabbi Elazar ben Azaryah listens to the words "this night" and hear...
How exactly must the Pesach lamb be cooked? The Torah says "roasted by fire," and the sages refuse to let the phrase pass without examination. Not on a metal spit, not on a grill, ...
The seder plate carries three companions on the night of freedom: matzah, roasted meat, and bitter herbs. The sages press the verse to see how these three depend on one another. Wh...
The Torah does not only tell Israel how to prepare the Pesach lamb. It builds a wall of prohibitions around getting it wrong. Eat none of it raw, and none of it boiled. The sages r...
This is the legal machinery behind a single verse, ground fine by the rabbis of the Talmud. If the lamb may only be roasted by fire, then what exactly counts as a violation, and wh...
An uncircumcised Israelite man may not eat the Pesach lamb, Scripture says plainly. But the sages reach further and ask: what about the second tithe, the produce a person carries u...
Even the choice of skewer becomes a matter of law on the night of the Pesach. The Mishnah describes the method with care: a spit cut from pomegranate wood is pushed in through the ...
The repeated phrase "roasted by fire" sends the sages searching for its limits. Rav Asi, citing Rabbi Yochanan, takes a hard case: a baker heats an oven until its walls glow, then ...
A single Hebrew phrase, "until morning," hangs at the edge of the Passover law, and the sages refused to let it sit there idle. The Torah commands that nothing of the paschal lamb ...
The sages return to those words "until morning" and read in them a calendar. The leftover paschal meat is not destroyed in the dark; it waits for the daylight of the sixteenth of N...
The great Babylonian voices gather around one stubborn question: when may the disqualified remnant of the Passover offering be burned, and when must it wait? The discussion opens w...
Two sages disagree over a fine but heavy question: does a person who illegally keeps part of the Passover offering past its hour suffer lashes? The Torah pairs a prohibition, "let ...
The command to eat the Passover "in haste" sets the table like a traveler's last meal, eaten standing, bags packed, ready to move. Rabbi Yose the Galilean draws a lesson in conduct...
When the verse declares, "And I will pass through the land of Egypt," Rabbi Judah reaches for an image the human heart can hold. He likens the moment to a king who passes in person...
The sages read the verse word by word as a declaration of God's unshared hand in the final plague. "Wrath" is no mild displeasure but burning fury, the same indignation the Psalmis...
The blood smeared on the doorposts was never meant for God, who needs no marker to find His people. The sages read the verse tightly: "a sign for you," not for Me, and not for othe...
Why was Israel spared on the night the destroyer walked through Egypt? The midrash reaches back across centuries to a mountain in Moriah. When Abraham bound his son and lifted the ...
A single verse calls Passover "a memorial," a day Israel must keep as a festival. But the verse leaves a gap: which day, exactly? The midrash works the problem like a careful reade...
The Torah commands a festival offering for Passover, and the sages stretch the obligation across the entire week. Rabbi Yose the Galilean anchors it in the phrase "seven days you s...
"Seven days you shall eat unleavened bread" sounds simple until the sages press on every word. Does the command cover any flat cake at all? No. The matzah of Passover is defined ag...
How exactly must leaven be destroyed before Passover? Rabbi Yehuda insists on fire and nothing else, and he builds his case with a chain of inferences from leftover sacrificial mea...
What makes a festival day holy in practice? The midrash answers concretely: food and drink and clean clothing mark the sanctity of the day, not abstract sentiment. From there the s...
The festival day is not a second Sabbath. The Torah carves out an exception in the phrase "what is eaten by every soul," and the sages build the whole law of festival cooking on it...
The dividing line between a festival day and the Sabbath is narrow: only the preparation of food sets them apart. But what about the tools that make cooking possible? A knife that ...
The verse says to guard the unleavened breads, and the rabbis hear in that word a craftsman's vigilance. Watch the dough so it never crosses the line into something forbidden. Then...
Not every flatbread counts. A loaf from the thanksgiving offering is unleavened, a nazirite's wafer is unleavened, yet neither one fulfills the obligation at the Seder. The reason ...
The Torah already said no work may be done on the festival, so why add that you must guard the day? Because labor is not the whole of it. There is a second tier of restriction the ...
When does leaven actually become a crime? Rabbi Yehudah and Rabbi Shimon split the year into three windows: before the festival, during it, and after. Yehudah holds a person can st...
How do you measure the festival's span so that a full night and day belong to it? Two masters anchor the count in two different verses. Rabbi Yochanan reaches for "from evening to ...
Passover law builds a wall around leaven, and the midrash lays the bricks one verse at a time. One passage forbids leaven from being found, another forbids it from being seen, and ...
The rule against keeping leaven on Passover hinges on a small possessive: with you. Reading it closely, the Sages draw a sharp line. Your own chametz you may not see, but the chame...
How much forbidden leaven does it take to count? The two great houses divide. Shammai measures by the substance: an olive's bulk of leaven, but a larger date's bulk of chametz, sin...
The Torah's command not to eat what is leavened during Passover reaches far beyond the obvious loaf of bread. The Sages stretch its net to catch the fermented foods that surrounded...
Not every flat cake counts as matzah on the night of Passover. The Sages comb through the kinds of bread a person might have on hand and ask which one actually discharges the duty....
The Sages press on the question of what counts as matzah, ruling out produce from which the tithes were never separated and ruling out the second tithe meant to be eaten in Jerusal...
The first Passover asked each household to do something with its hands. Take a bundle of hyssop, the Torah says, and from that single word the Sages teach a rule for the whole Tora...
On the night of the plague, Israel was told to stay behind shut doors until dawn. The Sages hear in this more than a one-time precaution. They read it together with the prophet's c...
Rav Yosef drew a hard lesson from the command that no Israelite step outside on the night of the plague. Once the Destroyer has been granted permission to strike, it no longer tell...
The verse says the LORD would "pass through" the land of Egypt to strike it down. Rabbi Yehudah catches the unusual word and offers an image to hold it. The Holy One moved through ...
The Sages turn the blood on the doorposts into an argument that reaches every Jewish home in every age. They reason from the lighter case to the weightier. The Passover blood in Eg...
When the Torah commands Israel to keep the Passover service once they enter the land, it adds two words that seem to hang in the air: "as He has spoken." Spoken where? The sages tr...
The Torah pictures a future scene: a child turns to a parent and asks what this Passover ritual means. The sages heard two very different things in that moment. To some it was a wa...
