2,211 passages in Rabbinic Midrash
Individual passages from Yalkut Shimoni on Torah, shown in source order. Page 25 of 47.
Pharaoh stood torn. Should he chase the freed slaves or let them go? Scripture says the Holy One, blessed be He, strengthened his heart, and the sages read that as God settling a m...
The Torah says "Pharaoh drew near," and the sages catch a double meaning in the word. He did draw near to Israel, yes, but in doing so he drew his own ruin closer to himself. Every...
The word "drew near" gets measured in marching speed. The midrash lays out the distances like a war report. The route that took Israel three days to cross, Pharaoh's forward scouts...
Cornered against the sea with an army at their backs, Israel did the one thing they knew how to do. They cried out to the LORD, taking up the family trade handed down from the patr...
Panic does not always sound like fear. Sometimes it sounds like an old grievance dug up at the worst possible moment. The midrash notes a strange detail of timing: the Israelites t...
Rabbi Yehudah counts the tally of rebellion: ten times in the wilderness Israel tested the Holy One, blessed be He. Two at the sea, two over bitter water, two over the manna, two o...
Moses told the people to stand still and watch for deliverance, and they pressed him: when? "Tomorrow," he answered. The people broke. "Moses our teacher, we have no strength left ...
The verse "He sent out His arrows and scattered them" (Psalms 18:15) describes how the Holy One, blessed be He, broke the Egyptian army at the sea. The sages read it as a double we...
Trapped between Pharaoh's chariots and the water, Israel splintered into four panicked factions, and the sages preserve each cry. One group despaired and said, Let us throw ourselv...
"The LORD will fight for you, and you shall hold your peace" (Exodus 14:14). The sages refuse to read this as a one-time promise for a single morning at the sea. The LORD will figh...
"Why do you cry out to Me? Speak to the children of Israel, that they go forward" (Exodus 14:15). The sages first let Moses explain his panic with a parable. He likens himself to a...
Why did the sea split at all? The sages refuse to treat the miracle as arbitrary and offer a chorus of answers, each rooting the rescue in a different merit. One reads it as God ke...
The sages stack reason upon reason for the great miracle, and several of them keep returning to one word: faith. God says, in effect, that last night Moses himself was complaining ...
When God told Moses to lift his rod over the sea, the splitting was not a single act but a cascade of wonders. The sages count ten distinct miracles in the water, each fastened to ...
As the Egyptians closed in, the angel of God and the pillar of cloud that had been leading Israel suddenly swung around to the rear (Exodus 14:19). The sages see more than a change...
On the night before the sea split, the pillar of cloud slid into the gap between the two camps, and it did double duty. Over Israel it spread light; over the Egyptians it spread a ...
The Torah says of that night that "the one did not come near the other." A short verse, and the sages pause on its plainness. Who kept away from whom? The answer the midrash gives ...
Rabbi Shmuel bar Nachmani turned the phrase "the one did not come near the other all the night" into something far larger than two armies on a beach. He read it as a scene in heave...
When Moses stretched his hand over the water, the sea did not part. It stood firm and refused him. Moses commanded it to split in the name of the Holy One, and it would not. He hel...
The verse says the LORD drove back the sea with a fierce east wind, and the sages ask why this particular wind. Their answer is that the east wind is the very instrument of divine ...
The Torah says Israel came into the midst of the sea, and two great teachers ask how that crossing began. Rabbi Meir paints a scene of holy eagerness. The tribes stood at the water...
The Torah says the waters stood as a wall for Israel on their right hand and on their left. The plain image is breathtaking enough, two towering ramparts of sea holding firm while ...
The midrash imagines that Israel did not walk through the sea alone. The angel Gabriel went down with them, encircling the people and standing guard like a living wall of water, an...
As Israel passed between the standing walls of water, an unseen prosecutor descended. Samael, the accusing angel, pressed his case before the Throne. "Master of the world," he argu...
It happened in the morning watch, just before dawn, that the heavens leaned over the drowning Egyptians. But the night before, the angel Gabriel had been eager to strike them down....
Scripture so often sets the great moments of deliverance at first light, and for a reason. When the sea split and Egypt was overthrown, it happened "in the morning watch," and the ...
As the eastern sky brightened over the sea, the verse says that the LORD "looked down" upon the camp of Egypt. The sages take this single word, the divine gaze, and trace it across...
The Torah says that at the sea God "turned aside the wheels" of the Egyptian chariots, and the sages picture the scene with vivid, almost mechanical precision. Rabbi Yehudah imagin...
Trapped between the closing waters and their own panic, the Egyptians cried out, let us flee from Israel, for the LORD is fighting for them. Even the enemy understood what was happ...
When the people were safely across, God told Moses to stretch out his hand so the sea would close again over Egypt. The sages hear in the command a principle of perfect justice. By...
Rabbi Yirmeyah ben Elazar widens Rabbi Yochanan's teaching into a sweeping claim about the world itself. It was not only the sea, he says, that God prepared in advance. At creation...
The sages return once more to the word that describes Egypt's end at the sea, va-yena'er, that God "shook them out." Where the earlier reading pictured a pot being upended, this on...
The sea splits, a nation escapes slavery. but according to some traditions, the heavenly hosts weren't exactly thrilled. to Yalkut Shimoni on Torah 238, a collection of rabbinic te...
Reading the verse that Israel walked through the sea with the waters "on their right and on their left," the sages refuse to let the words stay merely geographical. The right hand,...
The Torah says the LORD saved Israel "from the hand of Egypt" (Exodus 14:30), and the sages press on that single word: hand. Picture a small bird held in a closed fist. The bird is...
Why did the survivors need to see the corpses at all? The midrash gives four reasons, and each one closes off a doubt that fear loves to whisper. First, so Israel would never tell ...
"Israel saw the great hand" (Exodus 14:31), and the sages read "great" as a hint at scale. The deaths at the sea were not uniform; they were severe and strangely varied, no two ali...
The midrash builds an entire ladder out of one word: believed. Israel trusted, and as the wage for that trust the Holy Spirit settled on them and broke open into song at the sea (E...
The sages imagine the splitting of the sea as the verdict in a heavenly courtroom. As Israel marches out, Uzza, the angelic prince assigned to Egypt, files a lawsuit before the Hol...
The Song at the Sea opens with the word "then" - "Then Moses sang" (Exodus 15:1) - and the midrash links it to a psalm about waiting: "I waited and waited for the LORD" (Psalms 40:...
The sages will not let the opening word "then" pass without a confession hidden inside it. The same small word, they note, appears at one of Moses's lowest moments. Sent to Pharaoh...
The sages read the Hebrew word that opens the Song, "then" (az), as a tiny numerical riddle. It is spelled with two letters, alef and zayin. Alef carries the value one and zayin th...
Hidden inside one small Hebrew word, the rabbis hear the whole sweep of sacred history. The word is "then", and the sages noticed it tends to appear at the hinge moments of Israel'...
Rabbi Akiva paints the moment Israel sang at the sea as a kind of royal coronation in reverse. As the people lifted the Song, the Holy One, blessed be He, put on a robe of glory en...
From a single unexpected verb, Rabbi Meir pulls one of Judaism's boldest claims. The Torah says Moses "will sing", future tense, not "sang." Why speak of a future song about an eve...
Why does the Torah pair them so deliberately, "Moses and the children of Israel"? The rabbis read it as a scale balancing perfectly. Moses weighed as much as all of Israel, and Isr...
The rabbis pause on a wrenching image. As Israel stood trapped at the sea, hemmed in by water and pursued by Egypt, the angels of heaven gathered to sing God's praises. And God sil...
The verse calls the Song at the Sea "this song," singular, but the rabbis count ten great songs across all of sacred history. The song in Egypt, the song at the sea, the song at th...
