2,211 passages in Rabbinic Midrash
Individual passages from Yalkut Shimoni on Torah, shown in source order. Page 26 of 47.
The Song proclaims that God "is highly exalted," and the rabbis stretch the phrase across time. He was exalted at the sea, yes, but He is also destined to be exalted again, in a da...
The Song says God is "highly exalted," and the rabbis turn the phrase into a law of history: the proud are punished by the very thing they boasted in. The generation of the Flood g...
Resh Lakish hears a strange word inside the opening line of the Song at the Sea. Where we read "for He has triumphed gloriously" (Exodus 15:1), he hears a doubled word about pride:...
Why does the Song say "the horse and its rider" in the singular when an entire army drowned? One answer is plain: before the Holy One, blessed be He, Pharaoh's whole cavalry weighe...
The Song speaks of "horse and rider" in the singular, yet Scripture itself records six hundred chariots and Pharaoh's whole host. The sages resolve the tension with a principle tha...
Why does the verse say God "cast" the enemy down? Because the moment Israel watched the heavenly prince of Egypt topple from his place above, they broke into praise. The midrash dr...
When Israel sang "the LORD is my strength and song" at the edge of the sea, the sages listened closely to that word "strength." It is not only muscle or military might. The midrash...
The word "strength" in the Song carries more than one meaning, and here the sages hear in it the language of kingship. When Israel sings "the LORD is my strength," they are crownin...
A third reading of "the LORD is my strength" takes the word in its plainest and most personal sense: sheer might, the kind a frightened person leans on when everything else gives w...
The midrash imagines the praise at the sea as a duet. Israel calls out a verse of love, and a voice answers from heaven with a matching verse, line for line. It begins with a play ...
At the edge of the split sea, Israel finished its song and discovered that singing had made them bold. They turned to the Holy One and asked for the one thing the angels guarded mo...
Rabbi Eliezer makes an outrageous claim and stands by it: a humble maidservant standing at the shore of the split sea saw more of God than the towering prophets Ezekiel and Isaiah ...
One short phrase from the Song of the Sea launches an entire spiritual discipline: "This is my God, and I will glorify Him." The rabbis read it as a command to make the mitzvot bea...
Who first recognized God when Israel came up out of the sea? Not the elders, not the leaders, but the smallest among them. Rabbi Akiva teaches that the generation was redeemed in t...
How much of your wealth should a commandment cost you? The Mishnah lists deeds of loving-kindness among the things with no upper limit, but the rabbis here draw a sharp distinction...
When Israel sings "my father's God, and I will exalt Him," the midrash hears a woman declaring her lineage with unblushing pride: I am a queen, daughter of kings; beloved, daughter...
"The LORD is a man of war, the LORD is His name." Rabbi Yehudah calls this verse rich, and the midrash unpacks its wealth by showing God revealing Himself at the sea armed to the t...
The Song of the Sea pauses to settle accounts: "Pharaoh's chariots and his host He has cast into the sea." The rabbis read this through the principle that governs divine justice. B...
The sages read the opening of the Song of the Sea as more than a victory shout. They hear in it the precise arithmetic of heaven. Pharaoh had decreed that every Hebrew boy be flung...
The rabbis keep counting. Egypt sent six hundred chariots after the fleeing slaves, so the song answers that the chariots of Pharaoh and his host were swept away. Egypt staffed tho...
A small geographical objection drives this teaching. The Sea of Reeds, by the rabbis' reckoning, was a shallow place, not some bottomless ocean trench. So why does the song sing th...
The drowning at the sea, the sages teach, was wrapped in darkness. The lower deep surged up over the upper deep and blotted out the very sky, dimming the stars and the great lights...
The Song of the Sea uses three different images for the drowning Egyptians. Some are tossed like straw on the surface, some go down like a stone, and some sink like lead into the m...
The phrase "like a stone" turns from punishment to character. The Egyptians sank like stone because they had hardened their hearts like stone. Against that hardness the song sets t...
The "enemy" whom God will shatter is read here on a second level. Beyond Pharaoh stands Esau, the recurring oppressor of Israel through history, and the verse that begins "Because ...
The song praises God for exalting Himself against those who rose up against Him. But the verse does not say "those who rose against us"; it says "those who rose against You." From ...
The verse sings that the waters "piled up" at the Red Sea, but the rabbis hear a sharper word inside the Hebrew. The root for "piled" sounds like the root for "cunning," and that e...
The same standing waters worked two opposite wonders at once. For the Egyptians, the sea became a sealed flask. The rabbis play on the word for "wall," which sounds like the word f...
The rabbis seize on a strange phrase in the song: the depths congealed "in the heart of the sea." The sea has no heart. So why does Scripture give it one? Because, they teach, God ...
The song quotes the enemy mid-boast: The enemy said, I will pursue, I will overtake, I will divide the spoil. But the rabbis flag a puzzle. These words belonged to the opening of t...
Pharaoh ground out five short, ferocious verbs as he chased Israel: I will pursue, I will overtake, I will divide the spoil, my soul shall be filled, my hand shall dispossess. The ...
To grasp Pharaoh's folly, the rabbis offer a parable. Picture a common bandit standing outside a king's palace, shaking his fist and snarling, If I ever catch the king's son, I wil...
When the waters closed over Pharaoh, Israel saw more than a drowned army. They saw the kingdom of Egypt abolished and judgment carried out against Egypt's gods. So they opened thei...
The song asks, Who is like You among the mighty ones, O LORD? and the rabbis turn that question over from every side. First it praises the wonders at the Sea of Reeds, where God re...
Among mortals, fear runs backward. A king terrifies the stranger at the gate and grows familiar to the servants who pour his wine. With the Holy One, blessed be He, the order is re...
When Israel stood at the sea and sang, they chose their words with care. They did not say God did a wonder, in the past, finished and sealed. They said He is a doer of wonders, pre...
The sea-song is not a relic. "Doer of wonders" is read as a verb that never stops conjugating: God worked wonders with the fathers, He works them with us in every generation, and H...
"You stretched out Your right hand, the earth swallowed them" (Exodus 15:12). The rabbis pause first on the hand. Every soul that lives, they teach, rests in the palm of the Holy O...
When the Egyptians drowned, the dead had to go somewhere, and a quarrel broke out beneath creation. The sea hurled the bodies up onto the dry land, and the dry land hurled them bac...
"You stretched out Your right hand" is not only about Egypt. The rabbis gather a chain of prophecies where the same gesture recurs: God stretches out His hand against Assyria, agai...
"You led us in Your kindness, the people You redeemed" (Exodus 15:13). Israel sings a confession inside its praise. We were led out, they admit, not because of merit, for we had no...
"You guided them in Your strength to Your holy abode" (Exodus 15:13). The word the song chooses for "strength" catches the rabbis' attention. In their reading, strength means Torah...
When Israel stood at the sea and sang that the LORD had "led in His strength" and was guiding them "to His holy habitation," the sages heard in those words something larger than th...
The Yalkut Shimoni, a compilation of rabbinic teachings on the Bible, brings together a fascinating idea in its section on Torah, specifically paragraph 251. It quotes R’ Yehoshua ...
The verse says simply that the peoples heard and trembled, and the sages stopped to ask what exactly the nations had heard that shook them so badly. It was not one piece of news bu...
Why should the nations rage when they hear Israel is coming home? The midrash imagines God answering them with sharp impatience. Look at your own history, He says. Edom had a whole...
Not every nation that trembled did so out of memory or guilt. Some, the sages note, simply looked at the map. They saw that Israel, marching up from the sea, had no route into the ...
The song declares that the chiefs of Edom were dismayed, and the sages press on the word. Dismayed about what, exactly? Surely not fear of invasion, they reason, because the Torah ...
