2,211 passages in Rabbinic Midrash
Individual passages from Yalkut Shimoni on Torah, shown in source order. Page 29 of 47.
His son had just died, and a crowd filled the cemetery. Rabbi Akiva did not stay home with his grief. He asked for a bench to be carried out among the graves, sat down, and began t...
God had made Moses a promise back at the burning bush: bring the people out, and you will all serve Me on this mountain. So Moses kept counting, asking himself when the appointed t...
Why was the Torah given specifically in the third month, whose sign is the Twins? The midrash gives a pointed answer. The nations should never be able to complain that they were pa...
The verse from the Song of Songs reads, spread me about with apples, for I am sick with love. The midrash hears the apples as words of Torah, whose fragrance is sweet and steadying...
Rabbi Levi pictures a boy just risen from a long illness. His tutor wants to march him straight back to school, but the king refuses. The color has not returned to my son's face, h...
The apple tree gives almost no shade, so people pass it by, and that, the midrash says, is what the nations did on the day of the giving of the Torah. They fled the bare tree. But ...
The passage begins as a quiet lesson in bookkeeping. Israel learned to count its calendar from the Exodus, then from the years in the wilderness, then from the entry into the land,...
Scripture marks the moment with a strange precision. It does not merely say Israel arrived in the wilderness of Sinai; it insists, "On this day" (Exodus 19:1). The sages catch the ...
The Torah seems to repeat itself. One verse already told us Israel reached the wilderness of Sinai, and now another announces that they journeyed from Rephidim and came to that sam...
The midrash reads the doubled verse as a single moral lesson. At Rephidim the people had angered God and then, within a short time, turned back and were received. At Sinai the same...
The verse "And Moses went up to God" (Exodus 19:3) opens a sweeping meditation on the number seven. The sages run through the orders of creation and history and show that in each o...
Moses climbs the mountain, and the midrash slows the moment down to its smallest gestures. The ascent, it says, covers the first and second day. Then comes the detail that God call...
The same command, "Thus you shall say to the house of Jacob, and tell the children of Israel," yields a second reading. Where one interpretation heard the two phrases as women and ...
The midrash returns to the two audiences with a teaching about how to speak to each. To "the house of Jacob," the women, Moses is told to give the main points gently, the outline f...
The image of eagles' wings opens into a meditation on divine protection. The midrash notes that ordinary birds carry their young tucked between their feet, shielding them from pred...
When the Holy One, blessed be He, declared Israel a kingdom of priests, He was promising that no foreign crown would ever rightfully sit above them. He alone would be their King, t...
Moses climbed and descended Sinai again and again, and the rabbis read each trip as earning its own reward. Heaven kept a ledger, and no step toward God was ever wasted. When the v...
The people did not only want to hear God; they wanted to see their King, for hearing and seeing are not the same. And God answered that longing too, promising to come down on the t...
Rabbi Simai paints the scene at Sinai in color. The instant Israel said "we will do" before "we will hear," six hundred thousand angels descended, and each fastened two crowns on e...
On what day was the Torah given? The Rabbis say the sixth of the month; Rabbi Yose says the seventh. Yet the dispute is narrower than it sounds. Everyone agrees Israel reached the ...
The sages map the days of preparation onto the calendar, counting toward the sixth day when the Torah was finally given. On the fifth day Moses rose early and built an altar at the...
Resh Lakish describes the Torah Moses received as fire upon fire: parchment of white fire, letters of black fire, sealed in fire and wrapped in fire. As God wrote, He wiped the pen...
The warning at Sinai that struck down any "beast or man" who touched the mountain becomes a model case for the sages reading Scripture's broad terms narrowly or widely. When the To...
When Moses descended from Sinai, he did not stop to attend to his own business. He did not slip away to his own tent for a moment of rest. He went directly from the mountain to the...
Before Israel could stand at the foot of the mountain, they had to be made ready. Moses sanctified them. They washed their garments, purified their bodies, and changed into clean c...
The third day arrived, and the world shook. There were sounds layered upon sounds, voices unlike any voices, each one distinct from the next. There were flashes of light, not one k...
When Moses led the people out to meet God, the sages heard more than a marching order in the words. Rabbi Yehudah played on the verse "The LORD came from Sinai." Read it, he said, ...
The rabbis return to the love song to describe Israel at the sea, singing "I will sing to the LORD," their praise as comely as the strength founded from the mouths of infants. Then...
The whole mountain went up in smoke, not one patch but all of it, because God descended upon it in fire. The sages drew a portrait of Torah from this. Torah is fire, given from fir...
At the height of the revelation, God turned to Moses with a warning to carry down. Testify to the people. Hold them back. They must not break through the boundary to gaze, lest man...
The warning to keep back from the mountain raised a question about the priests. When God told Moses to go to the people, were the priests counted among them, already covered by the...
The Sages press on a single word in the Sinai story. Scripture warns that even the priests who draw near must sanctify themselves, but which priests? Rabbi Joshua ben Korhah reads ...
The first words of the Ten Commandments open with a claim about who is speaking. Rabbi Isaac reaches back to the dawn of the world and locks revelation and creation together. No on...
A short verse closes the chapter before the commandments are spoken: "And he said to them." The Sages refuse to let it pass as a throwaway line and find three teachings folded into...
Even the name used for God at Sinai carries weight. When the verse says "Elohim spoke," the Sages hear the title of a judge, one who exacts punishment for wrong and is faithful to ...
The little word "saying" turns out to describe a conversation, not a one-way command. The Sages read it as God's instruction to Moses: go out and tell Israel what I have said, then...
Before the first commandment is even unpacked, the Sages set the scene for its grandeur. They reach for a verse from Psalms: "The chariots of God are myriads upon myriads, thousand...
The Sages return to the chariots of God and push the vision further. Each of the twenty-two thousand chariots that came down on Sinai, they say, was no ordinary thing. Every one of...
Rabbi Eleazar ben Pedat takes the phrase "thousands of angels" and reads it as a description of beauty. The host that came down on Sinai was made of the most radiant and praisewort...
Think of the crowds of a great city. Where there are throngs, there is crush; shoulders press, no one can move. At Sinai the opposite happened. When the Holy One, blessed be He, de...
Why does the first commandment open with "Anokhi" rather than a plainer word for "I"? The sages turned the word over like a jewel. Read its letters as an acronym, said one master, ...
At the Sea of Reeds, Israel saw a mighty warrior wading into battle for them. At Sinai they saw a scribe bent over the parchment, patiently teaching Torah. In the days of Daniel th...
Our sages, drawing on ancient traditions, offer us some truly mind-bending glimpses. R' Levi, in the Yalkut Shimoni (a compilation of Midrashic (rabbinic interpretive commentary) t...
When the Holy One, blessed be He, rose and declared "I am the LORD your God," the very earth lost its footing. Mountains and hills shook. Tabor and Hermon tore loose and came runni...
When the Omnipresent declared "I am the LORD your God," the earth itself convulsed. Mountains streamed away, the divine Voice broke cedars and shook the wilderness, and the radianc...
God could have given the Torah on any soil. He chose the open wilderness, and the sages saw the wisdom in it at once. Had the Torah come down inside the borders of one tribe, the o...
Why does "You shall have no other gods" follow right after "I am the LORD your God"? The order is the whole lesson. The sages told it through a king entering a new province. His ad...
The Torah forbids making an idol. But the sages pressed a sharper question. What about an idol that already exists, one you did not carve yourself but inherited or acquired? The ve...
