2,211 passages in Rabbinic Midrash
Individual passages from Yalkut Shimoni on Torah, shown in source order. Page 27 of 47.
The fear of Edom's chiefs gets a second explanation here. Perhaps, the sages suggest, what truly frightened Esau's descendants was not loss of land at all but the reopening of an a...
Just as Edom's dread was traced back to the feud between Esau and Jacob, Moab's terror gets a second, deeper root. Moab descended from Lot, Abraham's nephew, and the sages remind u...
The song saves its strongest word of terror for the Canaanites: they did not merely tremble, they melted. The sages explain why their dread ran so much deeper than everyone else's....
When the sea split and Israel walked through on dry ground, the news did not stay at the water's edge. It raced across the land of Canaan like a fever. The verse separates the alar...
The Song speaks of enemies who became "still as a stone," and the sages ask which enemies and which moment. One answer points to the first attack after the crossing. Amalek did not...
The phrase "still as a stone" gets a second, quieter reading here, far from any battlefield. It is moved to the tense moment when Israel's scouts slipped into a hostile land, the k...
A third reading of "still as a stone" jumps ahead a full generation, past Moses entirely, to the day Israel finally crossed the Jordan into the land. The moment they set foot on th...
"Until Your people pass over, O LORD." The midrash hears in that one crossing the echo of every crossing still to come. Not only the sea behind them, but the Jordan ahead, and even...
From the single word "acquired" in the Song, the sages draw out a quiet web of connections. Four different things, they note, are each described in Scripture as God's acquisition, ...
The Song says "You will bring them and plant them," and the sages catch the pronoun. Not "bring us," not "plant us," but them. The ones singing at the sea were quietly foretelling ...
Just as four things were called God's acquisition, the midrash now finds four things called His inheritance, and the same destiny tightens around them. Israel, the Land, the Temple...
When the Holy One, blessed be He, laid the foundation of the whole earth, Scripture says He used a single hand. One hand was enough for sky and sea and every living thing. But when...
At the sea Israel sang that the Lord shall reign forever and ever, not that He reigns now. Rabbi Yose hears in that future tense a missed opportunity. Had they crowned Him in the p...
When Miriam lifted her timbrel at the shore of the sea, the rabbis ask a sharp question. Where did a fleeing people of slaves find drums and instruments in the wilderness? They had...
Not everyone who wants to sing before God earns the right to sing. Rabbi Simon teaches that song after a miracle is a sign of something deeper. Whoever is saved and responds with s...
One verse, three readings, all turning on a single odd phrase. Scripture says Moses caused Israel to journey from the Sea of Reeds, yet everywhere else the people moved at the word...
Why does Scripture compare Israel in the wilderness to a flock of sheep? The image is not flattering, and the rabbis lean into that. A flock scatters and bolts, and the shepherd ha...
The Exodus did not end neatly at the water's edge. When Pharaoh marshaled his chariots to pursue Israel, he had decked his warhorses in precious stones and pearls, a king's army gl...
When Israel marched out from the sea into the wilderness of Shur, the rabbis identify it with a place of pure terror. By their account it stretched eight hundred parasangs in every...
Rabbi Yose painted a picture that should make anyone shudder. In the Wilderness of Shur, the very stretch Israel had to cross after the Sea, lived serpents as thick as the wooden b...
The Torah says simply that Israel went three days into the wilderness and found no water. The rabbis refused to leave that line alone. Rabbi Yehoshua took it at face value. Rabbi E...
Three days into the desert, Israel reached the place called Marah, named for the bitterness of its waters. The rabbis read even the arrival closely. Rabbi Yehoshua heard the plural...
When the people cried out at the bitter waters of Marah, Moses cried out to God, and the answer came at once. From this the rabbis drew a lesson about prayer: the righteous are not...
The verse says that at Marah God set for Israel a statute and an ordinance. The rabbis heard in that line the first installment of law, given before Sinai. Even in the desert, fres...
The same phrase from Marah, "a statute and an ordinance," opened a debate about what kind of law was given there. Rabbi Yehoshua read it narrowly: it meant the honoring of father a...
The verse opens with a doubled phrase that reads, word for word, "if hearkening you will hearken." Hebrew often repeats a verb for emphasis, but the rabbis saw something deeper hid...
The doubled command to hearken opened a chain of teachings about how learning works. Hear one commandment well, the rabbis taught, and you are given many more to hear; forget one, ...
When Israel reached Elim, they found a small oasis: twelve springs of water and seventy palm trees. By ordinary reckoning, that water could barely keep the seventy trees alive. The...
The verse says Israel came to the wilderness of Sin "on the fifteenth day" of the second month. Why bother naming the day at all? The sages answer that the count matters: that part...
Why does Scripture keep marking the exact day of each stage of the journey? The sages answer: so that we can count our way to the morning the Torah was given. They lay the calendar...
Why does the Torah pin down the exact day the manna first fell? Because the sages want to track the people's hunger to the hour. When Israel fled Egypt they had no time to let thei...
Barely free of Egypt, the people turn on Moses and Aaron with a cry that drips with false memory. Would that we had died by the hand of the Holy One in the land of Egypt, they moan...
When the LORD tells Moses, "I will rain bread from heaven for you," the sages hear an echo of Job: "For by them He judges peoples; He gives food in abundance." One word, "by them,"...
Bread, by every natural law, rises from the earth, not from the sky. So why does the manna fall from heaven? Because, as the Psalm says, whatever the LORD desires, He does. He once...
Rabbi Yohanan draws a fine line. Rain, he says, can fall for the sake of a single deserving person, since the verse speaks of "the rain of your land in its season." Provision of fo...
Among the wonders of the wilderness bread, the sages note one comfort that is easy to overlook. The manna did not arrive as cold ration or stale crust. It came down warm, ready to ...
Why did the manna fall only one day's portion at a time, with nothing left over for tomorrow? The sages give an answer that turns a practical inconvenience into a spiritual gift. H...
When the Holy One, blessed be He, promised Moses bread from heaven, the sages heard layers in a single word. "Behold," said Rabbi Yehoshua, means I am acting now and will not delay...
The verse that says "on the sixth day they shall prepare what they bring in" became the seedbed for the whole rhythm of the Sabbath table. Rav Chisda heard in it a command to rise ...
A famous dispute about an egg laid on a festival opens this passage, and behind it stands the manna. The House of Shammai permit eating the egg; the House of Hillel forbid it. Rabb...
The sages read a moral lesson into the timing of Israel's food. The bread, which they asked for rightly, was given in the proper way, by morning. The meat, which they demanded out ...
When Moses tells Aaron to summon the people to draw near before the LORD, the sages hear two very different invitations in the same words. Rabbi Yehoshua says they were called clos...
God tells Moses, I have heard the murmurings of Israel, and Rabbi Yehoshua adds that He knew not only what they had said but what they would yet say in generations to come. The rep...
The Torah says quail came up at dusk, and the rabbis listened to the very spelling of the word. The same letters can spell "tranquility," and so the bird fed the righteous like a c...
The sages kept asking the same question from a fresh angle. Why did God send the manna down fresh every single morning instead of dropping a whole year's supply at once? One answer...
In the study hall, Rabbi Tarfon and the elders are deep in the portion of the manna when young Rabbi Elazar of Modi'in makes a startling claim: the manna piled sixty cubits high. T...
Rabbi Yehoshua reads the verse plainly: the dew lifted, the manna lay fine and flaky like frost on the ground, and that is simply how it fell. Rabbi Elazar of Modi'in reads the sam...
The instruction was simple: go out and gather the manna, an omer for each person. But the people made their predictions. Surely the prince Nachshon son of Amminadab, with his whole...
