2,211 passages in Rabbinic Midrash
Individual passages from Yalkut Shimoni on Torah, shown in source order. Page 23 of 47.
Rabban Gamliel set a rule that still governs the seder table: you cannot fulfill the Passover night without actually saying three words aloud and explaining what they mean. Skip th...
One short verse says Israel "went and did," and the sages refuse to let the doubled words pass unnoticed. Why mention both the going and the doing? Because, they teach, God pays wa...
At the stroke of midnight, Egypt's firstborn fell. The sages fix on the precision of that hour. Moses had announced the blow for "about midnight," because no human being, not even ...
A king does not normally stir before the third hour of morning. So when Scripture says Pharaoh "rose at night," the sages catch the break in royal habit. And he did not send servan...
On the night of the plague, Pharaoh did not send for Moses and Aaron through proper channels. He went looking himself, wandering the land and asking strangers where Moses lived, wh...
The rabbis open with a startling claim: for all forty years in the wilderness, a north wind blew every single night at exactly midnight, the same hour when God struck Egypt's first...
When the plague of the firstborn struck, Pharaoh did not summon Moses. He came himself, pounding on the door in the dead of night. Moses and Aaron answered with cold scorn. "Are we...
Israel left in such haste that the dough on their hands never had time to ferment. The midrash hears in that detail more than a culinary accident. It points forward to a future red...
How did Israel, yesterday's slaves, walk out of Egypt laden with silver and gold? The midrash offers several pictures of the same miracle. Read plainly, an Egyptian handed over his...
A single verse, two stubborn wills. The Torah says the Egyptians lent Israel their silver and gold, and the sages refuse to read "lent" as a polite transaction. It happened against...
The Torah gives a single line of itinerary, from Ramses to Succoth, and the midrash measures it. Forty parsangs of road, yet the voice of Moses calling the people to march carried ...
What was Succoth, the first stop out of Egypt? The sages disagree in a way that opens the verse wide. Rabbi Eliezer says it was literal booths, huts the people threw up overnight, ...
The dough came out of Egypt unleavened because redemption would not wait. Israel kneaded it but had no time to let it rise, and the midrash hears in that haste a pattern, pointing ...
Two verses seem to clash over how long Israel suffered. One counts four hundred and thirty years, another only four hundred. The midrash resolves it by the calendar of promise: the...
A single night in the calendar carries a promise older than the Exodus itself. When the verse calls it a night of watching unto the LORD, the rabbis hear an appointment that God se...
The seder table holds a quiet paradox. The rabbis required four cups of wine for the Passover night, yet they also warned that eating or drinking in pairs invites danger from harmf...
Before the laws of the Passover offering are spelled out, the verse opens with a sweeping headline: This is the statute of the Passover. The rabbis treat that headline as a key to ...
The single word "it," repeated through these verses, becomes the hinge on which the whole law of the Passover meal turns. Each time the Torah says of the offering, "No foreigner sh...
The law of the Passover lamb reaches past the head of the household to everyone bound to it, and the rabbis follow that thread carefully. The circumcision of a man's servants can h...
One more verse narrows the company at the Passover table: a sojourner and a hired servant shall not eat of it. The rabbis first fix the terms. The "sojourner" is the resident alien...
The same phrase that guarded the Passover table now travels into the laws of the priestly portion. The rabbis ask a precise question: how do we know that an uncircumcised man may n...
The closing laws of the Passover lamb gather the meal into a single fellowship and guard it from the inside out. In one house shall it be eaten does not mean four walls, the rabbis...
The Torah seems to repeat itself. First it promises that a convert who joins Israel "shall be as one born in the land," and then it adds, "One law shall there be for the native and...
Not everyone who joins Israel arrives with the same heart, and the Sages do not pretend otherwise. They sort converts into three honest types. One converts to marry a Jewish woman....
When God commands, "Consecrate to Me every firstborn," the Sages pause to show how the Torah teaches itself. This single command becomes a classroom for one of the great interpreti...
The Torah set the firstborn of a person and the firstborn of an animal side by side, and the Sages read that pairing as an invitation to let each teach the other. What is true of o...
If you read only the verse commanding Israel to bring their firstborn animals to the Temple, you might fear that a herdsman living far from Jerusalem is obligated to haul every new...
The Sages keep pressing the same theme: God commands not because He lacks anything but so that Israel can earn reward. He does not need the daily lamb, for all the beasts of Lebano...
Rabbi Elazar ben Azariah continues his sweep through Scripture's renamings. Abram becomes Abraham, and the old name is simply gone. Sarai becomes Sarah, and again the first name pa...
Moses tells Israel to remember the day they left Egypt, and the Sages want to know just how far that duty reaches. The plain command might cover only daytime. But another verse str...
Open a siddur and you will find a chain of names at the head of the central prayer: God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob. The sages did not invent that wording. They pulled i...
Many prohibitions in the Torah carry an obvious meaning: do not eat this. But the sages noticed that the phrase governing Passover leaven, "leaven shall not be eaten," reaches furt...
The Egyptian Passover, the sages noticed, was nothing like the one we keep for a week. Its leaven ban lasted exactly one day, the day of departure itself, read out of the words "le...
Was the Exodus God's doing or Israel's? The midrash refuses to choose. One voice reads the command to eat the Passover offering with loins girded and staff in hand as proof that Is...
The Torah promises a homeland, but it names that land in shifting numbers. Sometimes it lists seven nations to be displaced, sometimes only five. The sages reconcile the count with...
The Torah commands a parent to tell the child the story, and the sages press on every word to fix the moment. Not from the start of the month, not even in the daylight, but "becaus...
The Torah commands a "sign upon your hand," and the sages mine the phrasing to discover exactly how tefillin are built and worn. Logic alone might suggest the hand box should mirro...
The discussion of tefillin continues, and the sages keep probing which arm, where on the head, and why it all matters. Rav Ashi seals the question of the arm with a single spelling...
The verse hands two clues at once. "It shall be a sign upon your hand," and "so that the Lord's Torah may be in your mouth." The first half sounds open to everyone, the way the mez...
"Keep this ordinance in its season, from days to days." The sages pressed on every word. "Days" rules out the nights. "From days," not every day, lifts the duty off the Sabbath and...
The word "keep" carries a hidden boundary line. "It shall be a sign upon your hand" sounds wide enough to include even the youngest child, and the logic seems to push that way: the...
The phrase "from days to days" keeps narrowing the window. If "a sign upon your hand" stood alone, you might bind tefillin through the night as well, since the mezuzah on the door ...
"From days to days" yields a craftsman's lesson. The House of Hillel hears in the word "days" a span of no less than twelve months, the same measure the Torah uses for the redempti...
"And you shall set apart every firstborn to the Lord." The word for set apart means to separate, to lift a thing out of the ordinary and hand it over. From here the sages worked th...
The Torah commands that the firstborn male of a donkey, an animal unfit for the altar, must still be redeemed, and the means of redemption is fixed: a lamb. The midrash presses on ...
"If you will not redeem it, then you shall break its neck." The order of the words teaches the order of the duties: redemption comes first, and breaking the neck is only the grim f...
The law of the firstling donkey sounds severe until you see what it is teaching. A firstborn donkey belongs, in a sense, to the holy realm. Its owner is meant to ransom it by givin...
How do you redeem a firstborn son? The Torah commands the redemption but seems to give the price in scattered pieces, and the sages gather them into a single rule of reading. One v...
