2,211 passages in Rabbinic Midrash
Individual passages from Yalkut Shimoni on Torah, shown in source order. Page 28 of 47.
Moses gave a clear command: do not save any manna overnight. Trust that tomorrow's portion will fall. Some people could not do it. The text calls them exactly what they were, the o...
The morning gathering of the manna becomes the springboard for a cascade of teachings. From a comparison of verses the sages learn that precious stones and pearls fell with the man...
When the people miss the morning gathering, they ask Moses if they may at least go out at dusk to look. He stops them. For today is a Sabbath to the LORD, and the manna will not be...
The single verse "Eat it today" is read three times over, each time yielding a fresh harvest. Rabbi Yehoshua hears in it a vast reward. Keep the Sabbath and the Holy One will grant...
When some of the people violate the Sabbath, the rebuke falls not on them alone but on all Israel. How long will you refuse to keep My commandments, the Holy One asks, and Rabbi Ye...
The law that the leap year is fixed only by those formally invited becomes a window into rabbinic delicacy. Rabban Gamliel summoned seven to the upper chamber and found eight. Who ...
The exchange begun in the upper chamber finds its tender close. When Samuel the Small had taken the blame for entering uninvited, Rabban Gamliel answered with affection rather than...
When manna fell double on the sixth day, Moses told Israel to look closely at the gift in their hands. "See the pearl I have given you," the LORD seemed to say through him, "bread ...
The first Sabbath in the wilderness was more than a test of obedience. According to Rabbi Joshua, Moses framed it as a doorway to future joy. Keep this one day of rest, he told the...
The Torah says the manna looked like coriander seed, round and white, and the sages turned that small description into a meditation on its mysteries. Why was it called gad? Because...
A jar of manna was set aside to be kept for all generations, a sign that God had fed Israel in the wilderness. The sages asked when Aaron placed it down and concluded it must have ...
When Moses told Aaron to take a jar and fill it with manna, the very word for the vessel held a hint. The sages read tzintzenet as something through which the contents shine, and c...
Scripture says Israel ate the manna for forty years, until they reached an inhabited land at the edge of Canaan. The sages noticed the phrasing carried a puzzle, since the manna ac...
The Torah pauses to define a measure. An omer, it says, is a tenth of an ephah, and the sages worked out the smaller units, fitting it into seven quarter-measures with a fraction l...
When the people had no water at Rephidim, they did not bring their complaint to Aaron. They aimed it straight at Moses. The sages saw something revealing in that choice. The ordina...
The people had no water, and instead of crying out to Heaven they turned on the man who led them out of Egypt. They surrounded Moses and demanded he produce a spring on the spot, a...
The same complaint can be read a second way, and the rabbis turn it over to find a stranger comfort hidden inside the rebuke. Moses tells the people that their quarreling, for all ...
At Marah, earlier in the journey, the water was bitter but the people had not yet truly suffered. Now at Rephidim thirst sinks its teeth into them, and their fear turns ugly. Rabbi...
God tells Moses two words that seem simple: pass on before the people. The sages hear in them a whole posture of leadership, and they offer three ways to understand what God was as...
God instructs Moses to take the elders along as witnesses, so that no one could later sneer that hidden springs had been there all along. He is also to bring the staff, the same on...
God promises Moses that He will be present at the rock, and adds a startling word of intimacy: wherever you find the print of a human foot, there I stand before you. The God of the...
The name Amalek is unpacked as a people that came to lick, am laq, for they fell upon Israel like a dog lapping blood. Rabbi Simeon ben Halafta compares them instead to a fly, the ...
Why did Amalek attack? Rabbi Joshua and Rabbi Hisma answer with a line from Job: can a reed grow tall without a marsh, can meadow-grass live without water? Israel is that reed. It ...
When the Torah says Amalek fought Israel "at Rephidim," the sages heard more than a place name. Rabbi Hanina once pressed his teacher Rabbi Eliezer on it, and the plain answer was ...
When Moses sends Joshua into battle against Amalek, he chooses one small word with great care. He does not say "choose for me men." He says choose for us men, lifting his student t...
Why Joshua and not someone else? The midrash answers from his bloodline. Joshua descends from Joseph, and the prophet Obadiah had already written the verdict over Esau: the house o...
Joshua obeyed exactly, refusing to bend a single word of what Moses had decreed. Moses, Aaron, and Hur climbed the hill to call up the merit of the ancestors. And then the Torah sa...
The midrash gathers a cluster of objects that seem to hold power and shows that none of them do. When the people were dying of snakebite, God told Moses to mount a bronze serpent o...
The Torah says the hands of Moses grew heavy, and the sages ask why a leader would sit on a bare stone with no cushion. The answer reframes everything. Since Israel was in distress...
When Aaron and Hur stood on either side of Moses to steady his hands, the sages found a rule for the house of prayer. A prayer-leader may not lead unless two others flank him, one ...
The Torah says Joshua "weakened" Amalek, and the sages mine that single verb for everything it can yield. Rabbi Joshua reads it plainly: Joshua went down and cut off the heads of t...
The oldest sages handed down a single rule and watched it move down the generations like a verdict that never expires. The whip that strikes Israel, they said, is itself destined t...
Heaven rarely speaks in plain sentences. More often it leaves a hint, a sign dropped into an ordinary moment, and the question is whether the righteous catch it. The sages counted ...
When the verse promises to blot out the memory of Amalek, the sages refused to let the words stay vague. To blot out, they taught, means root and branch: him, his children, his chi...
Moses built an altar after the war and named it for God's own presence in the fight. Rabbi Eleazar read a startling claim into that name. The miracle, Moses understood, God perform...
The verse breaks off oddly, declaring that a hand is raised upon the Throne of the LORD. The sages heard in it an oath. God swore by His own throne of glory that He would leave Ama...
The Torah declares war against Amalek from generation to generation, and the sages refused to read that phrase as a single span of time. Each of them stretched it across a differen...
The sages taught that three duties waited for Israel the moment they entered the land: to set a king over themselves, to wipe out the seed of Amalek, and to build the Temple, the C...
God speaks in the first person about a pursuit that never lets up. From generation to generation I am after him, He says, chasing Amalek across the whole sweep of history, from the...
Israel left Egypt clutching one mitzvah no whip could pry loose. Even when the Egyptians sneered that circumcision only marked their babies for the Nile, the people answered withou...
When the verse says Jethro heard, the sages asked the obvious question: heard what, exactly? News travels, but which report moved a Midianite priest to pack up and join Israel in t...
The sages read Jethro as the model gentile who comes and joins Israel, the convert hinted at when Scripture speaks of those who love God. Amalek and Jethro stood side by side on th...
Jethro made a choice the sages found astonishing. He left the comforts of settled life, the glory of the inhabited world, and walked out into the empty wilderness just to be near M...
The word for Jethro's joy hides a sharper meaning. Rav read it as Jethro taking a blade to his own flesh, circumcising himself to enter the covenant. Shmuel read it the opposite wa...
Jethro had seen the world. A slave, he knew, could never escape Egypt, yet here was God leading out six hundred thousand. That arithmetic alone forced the words from his mouth: now...
The sages marveled at the burnt offering Jethro brought. Yesterday this man poured libations to idols; today he was sacrificing to the God of Israel. And where was Moses during the...
Jethro did not merely diagnose the problem; he prescribed a cure, and the sages mined every word of his advice. First, take counsel with God. Then be for the people like a full ves...
Moses needed judges, and the sages turned over every word of the standard his father-in-law had given him. "Able men" - did that mean soldiers, or men of wealth, or simply people w...
