2,211 passages in Rabbinic Midrash
Individual passages from Yalkut Shimoni on Torah, shown in source order. Page 3 of 47.
Customs differed from town to town. In some places, including the South, people would offer condolences to mourners even on Shabbat; elsewhere they held back. Rabbi Yehoshua, arriv...
What does it actually mean that God "blessed" and "sanctified" the seventh day? The sages answer with a list of concrete signs, beginning in the wilderness. The manna proved both. ...
The radiant light of the first day was not extinguished when the sun and moon were set in place. Even though those luminaries were diminished, the original light kept shining. The ...
Why was the seventh day blessed? One answer here is almost playful: it was blessed with flavor, with a taste no spice rack can supply. The story belongs to Rabbi Yehudah the Prince...
A gentile neighbor was warned by his astrologers that all his wealth was destined to end up with a man known simply as Yosef-who-honors-the-Sabbath. Hoping to outrun the prophecy, ...
The Roman official Turnus Rufus tried to corner Rabbi Akiva. "What makes this day, Shabbat, different from any other?" Akiva fired the question back: "What makes this man, you, dif...
Every sacred day in the calendar can be pushed aside when something larger crowds in. A festival yields; even the Day of Atonement can be moved. Only the Sabbath holds its ground, ...
Why does the Torah open with creation rather than the first commandment given to Israel in Egypt? The rabbis answer with a warning against pride. God scrambled the order so no prie...
When the verse says "These are the generations of the heaven and the earth when they were created," the rabbis hear something tender underneath. The One who made the world is also ...
Two words look almost identical in Scripture, "these" and "and these," yet the rabbis hear opposite meanings. "And these" adds to what came before. Bare "these" cancels it. So when...
How tall was the first human? The rabbis trade figures, a hundred cubits, two hundred, three hundred, even nine hundred, one of them reasoning from how long a sycamore takes to gro...
The rabbis read the shapes of the Hebrew letters as a map of the soul's journey. Two letters built two worlds. This world was made with the letter heh, and its very form tells a st...
Why a portico for a world? The rabbis say the letter heh is shaped like an open hall, and a hall is built so that anyone who wishes can walk out. That is the human condition: the f...
One such answer comes from the Yalkut Shimoni, a compilation of rabbinic commentary on the Hebrew Bible. In its section on the Torah, specifically section 20, there's a passage tha...
A single short comment unfolds the whole vocabulary of rainfall. The verse notes that the LORD God had not yet caused rain to fall, and the rabbis pause on what rain actually does ...
Read the verse slowly and a pattern surfaces. When the Torah speaks of rain at the dawn of the world, it uses the full divine Name over a full world, because rain is not a minor we...
The rabbis turn from the question of why rain falls to a more physical puzzle: where does the water actually come from? Two great teachers take opposite sides. Rabbi Eliezer says t...
The sages catalogue rain as a poet would, hunting for the hidden meaning packed into each Hebrew name. Even the dispute over where clouds come from gets a parable. Rabbi Yochanan, ...
The midrash draws a sharp line between two kinds of rain. There is the ordinary cycle, in which clouds simply haul water up from the sea and drop it wherever the King directs them....
Rabbi Yose ben Ketzarta reads the forming of Adam through a baker's hands. A woman wets her dough, works it, and then lifts out the sacred portion, the challah, from the middle of ...
A single oddity in the spelling launches this whole passage. The verb "and He formed" is written with two yods where one would do. Rav Nachman bar Rav Chisda hears in the doubled l...
The verse says God built the woman, and the rabbis press the architecture of that word. A storehouse is constructed wide at the bottom and narrow at the top, so the heavy produce s...
How big was the first human? The midrash starts with the claim that God made Adam androgynous, both male and female in one body, and Rabbi Shmuel bar Nachmani sharpens it: a single...
When a woman miscarries a shapeless mass, the early sages asked a hard question: was it ever truly a child? Rabbi Meir ruled that even a form resembling an animal counts, while the...
Why was the first human shaped, and why from the dust of the earth? The midrash circles the question with a chain of bold images. It even asks why Abraham, called "the great human,...
Before the human could live, the midrash says, God first stood him up as a giant lifeless figure stretching from the earth to the sky, and only then cast a soul into him. In this w...
Piety can curdle into self-harm, and Rabbi Yose draws a firm line. A person, he rules, has no right to grind himself down with fast after fast. The danger is plain and unsentimenta...
When Scripture says God planted a garden in Eden, the sages lingered over the very full divine Name used for that planting, and built from it one of their most lavish visions of th...
Before there was a world, the rabbis taught, seven things were already there, held in the mind of God like blueprints waiting for the foundation to be poured. The list is deliberat...
Not every sage agreed that all seven things were fully made before the world. Some drew a sharper distinction. Only two, they said, were truly brought into being beforehand: the To...
Rabbi Eliezer the son of Rabbi Yose the Galilean taught that the aggadah, the storytelling layer of Torah, is unfolded by thirty-two interpretive rules. He offers one of them here ...
The Torah tells the making of the first human twice, and the rabbis refuse to let that look like a contradiction. First comes the headline, "And God created the human in His image"...
What kind of tree stood at the center of the garden, the one whose fruit cost Adam everything? Rabbi Meir gives an answer that sounds almost like a joke and turns out to be deadly ...
If wheat will not satisfy you, the sages keep guessing at the forbidden fruit. Rabbi Yehudah says grapes, citing the verse about grapes of gall (Deuteronomy 32:32), for those clust...
One spring fed the whole young world. "And a river went out from Eden" (Genesis 2:10), and from a single channel it split into four. The Pishon grows flax and runs gently; it circl...
Why does Scripture crown the Euphrates with the title "great" when other rivers go without it? An alternate reading drops the geography and reaches for honor. The Perat earned the ...
A single river carries several names, and each name hides a meaning the sages are eager to pry open. The Euphrates is the Perat, and it is also the river Kevar that Ezekiel knew. W...
The Euphrates is the chief of waters; vow away its water and you have vowed away every drop on earth, for all rivers rank beneath it, and even springs are only its hidden ladders. ...
Where does the world's water truly come from? Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi gives a startling answer. Every drop the whole world drinks is only the runoff of the Garden of Eden. The sing...
When the Torah praises the land beyond Eden, it says simply that "the gold of that land is good." The rabbis seized on that one word, good. Why specify? Because if some gold is cal...
One short verse, four readings. When the Torah says the Holy One, blessed be He, "took the man and placed him in the Garden," the sages refused to let a single word lie flat. The H...
If God placed Adam in the Garden "to work it and to keep it," what work could there possibly be? The sages pressed the question hard, because Eden does not behave like a farm. Was ...
One verse, "And the Lord God commanded the man," became the foundation for the entire moral law binding on all of humanity. Long before Sinai, the rabbis taught, the children of No...
The warning God gave the first man is short and absolute: eat from the forbidden tree, and "you shall surely die." In Hebrew the phrase doubles the verb, literally "dying you shall...
The Mishnah teaches that the world was made through ten divine utterances. Counting them is harder than it sounds, because the obvious tally falls short, and the sages debated whic...
A man might think that once he has fathered children, his obligation is complete and he is free to live out his days alone. The rabbis rejected that idea flatly. Rav Nachman, citin...
Rabbi Tanchum bar Chanilai built a striking portrait of the unmarried man, and it is a portrait of absence. Without a wife, he taught, a man lives without every good thing the trad...
The sages taught that a man without a wife lives without true help, without atonement, and without real life. The very phrase that names her, helper corresponding to him, holds a w...
