2,211 passages in Rabbinic Midrash
Individual passages from Yalkut Shimoni on Torah, shown in source order. Page 34 of 47.
Not every dispute drags a person to swear in court. The Sages set a floor. A claim must be worth at least two silver maahs before a defendant can be made to take an oath, and the c...
A guardian's duty begins with words. Rabbi Yishmael ruled that liability attaches only when an owner says plainly, "here, keep this for me." A vague "keep an eye on it" binds no on...
The Torah's law of the thief contains two phrases that seem to say the same thing: "if the thief is found" and "if the thief is not found." The Sages refused to let either be redun...
The Torah says a guardian accused of mishandling a deposit "shall draw near to the judges." The Hebrew word for those judges is also a word for God, and the Sages mined that single...
A neighbor leaves a sealed jar of oil in your care. You don't pay him; you simply agreed to watch it. Then one day you tilt that jar to pour a measure for yourself. The moment your...
The Torah lists what a guardian may be held to account for: an ox, a donkey, a sheep, a garment, and then sweeps wider with "any lost thing" (Exodus 22:8). The sages saw a pattern ...
Here two great schools take opposite sides of a question that still divides courtrooms and consciences: does a guilty thought already make a guilty person? Beit Shammai read the ph...
You find a stray donkey on the road, or a cloak dropped in the dust. The Torah's word for the garment, set among the list of a guardian's charges, becomes the model for a far broad...
Rabbi Yochanan, through Rabbi Chiyya bar Abba, sets down a sharp ruling. A person who picks up a lost object becomes, in a sense, its guardian. If he then lies and claims a thief c...
Money disputes test the heart. A man says, "You owe me a hundred." The other says, "I owe you nothing." Now suppose witnesses prove he holds fifty. Must he swear about the remainin...
One short phrase, "for any matter of trespass," is made to carry several pillars of law at once. First, the sages ask whether it merely separates the rules for cash from those for ...
The Torah opens a second case of guardianship: "When a man gives to his fellow a donkey or an ox or a sheep, or any animal, to keep" (Exodus 22:9). The sages reach again for their ...
The Torah opens its laws of guarding with a deceptively small scene: one man hands an animal to another and walks away. The sages ask the obvious question that most people skip. Wh...
The Torah sets up a guardian's oath for cases where no witness saw what happened. Issi ben Yehudah turns the verse over and reads its silence as a condition. The oath exists precis...
What happens when a court cannot trust either party? Normally the rule is clean. When one litigant is suspected of swearing falsely, his honest opponent swears instead and collects...
From a single verse the sages draw a sweeping rule. Because the Torah specified here that the guardian's oath uses the divine name, every oath in the entire Torah must be sworn wit...
One of the structural pillars of Torah monetary law is hidden in a short phrase. Whoever the Torah requires to take an oath "swears and does not pay." The sages anchor this in the ...
The Torah hides an entire legal architecture inside the laws of Mishpatim, and the sages draw it out as a clean fourfold structure. There are four kinds of guardian, each with a di...
What happens when a guardian claims a predator killed the animal in his care? The Torah says "let him bring it as evidence," and the rabbis read this two ways. By one reading he br...
One of the strangest exemptions in Torah law is the rule of "borrowing in the presence of the owner." A borrower who normally pays for everything is suddenly freed of all liability...
The Torah hands the guardian of another man's animal a thicket of cases, and the Sages walk through it one branch at a time. Start with who is even on the hook. A paid keeper benef...
Scripture lifts the borrower out of the crowd of guardians and treats him as his own case. The first thing the rabbis notice is a boundary line: the borrower is not liable until th...
The rabbis here expose the limits of pure logic and show why the Torah cannot rely on inference alone. The case is a man who seduces an unmarried young woman still under her father...
This is a dense rabbinic argument, and its center is a single question: does the fine for violating an unmarried young woman belong to her, or to her father? Rabbi Yose the Galilea...
The sages gather the loose ends of the seduction law and ties them to the very foundation of Jewish marriage. The Torah's command that the offender "weigh out silver according to t...
The Torah commands, "You shall not allow a sorceress to live," and the rabbis open with a question of plain reading: why name a woman when the law binds men equally? Their answer i...
The Torah condemns the man who lies with a beast, and the rabbis work the verse like surveyors marking out exactly what it covers. First the boundaries: "a man" excludes a minor, w...
When Israel stood before the golden calf, they cried out a single word that should have doomed them. The verse reads, "These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the ...
The Torah threatens death for anyone who sacrifices to other gods, but the rabbis notice something missing. A punishment without a prior warning is unjust. Where, then, was the war...
The Torah does not whisper its protection of the convert. It shouts. Rabbi Eliezer the Great counts thirty-six separate warnings against mistreating the stranger who joins Israel, ...
The midrash imagines the cruelest taunt one could hurl at a convert: yesterday you bowed to Bel and Nebo, you still have pig between your teeth, and now you dare speak against me. ...
The Torah forbids afflicting the widow and the orphan, and the Sages dispute how wide the verse reaches. Rabbi Yishmael reads the unusual phrasing as deliberately expansive. The ve...
The doubled verb "if you afflict him at all" carries a strict legal sense: a person is not fully liable until he afflicts and then repeats it. But the midrash turns this dry rule i...
God promises to hear the cry of the afflicted, and the Sages wrestle with what that promise really covers. At first the verse seems to make crying out a condition: cry, and I will ...
God warns those who afflict the widow and orphan that His wrath will burn against them, that He will kill them by the sword, leaving their own wives widowed and their children fath...
We are used to reading the word "if" as a doorway we may or may not walk through. The sages noticed something strange about one verse in Exodus. Nearly every "if" in the Torah open...
The Torah's command to lend does not treat all borrowers as equal claimants. The sages ranked them. Your own people come before a stranger, the poor before the rich, and the poor o...
The Torah forbids a lender from becoming "as a creditor" to a poor neighbor, and the sages read that ban with unusual tenderness. It does not merely forbid harsh collection. It for...
The Torah calls him "the poor man with you," and the sages heard a warning folded into that little word "with." The Holy One, blessed be He, speaks directly to the person holding t...
The Torah commands a lender who has taken a poor man's garment as collateral to return it by nightfall, because the man needs it to sleep in. The sages turned that practical mercy ...
Hebrew loves to double its verbs. "Taking you shall take," "returning you shall return," "sending you shall send." To an ordinary ear this is just emphasis. To the sages, every dou...
The two verses about a debtor's garment seem almost to contradict each other. One says return the pledge by sunset; the other says return it when the sun goes down. The sages resol...
Rabbi Ishmael drew a generous principle out of the pledge laws. The verse teaches, he said, that you can perform a mitzvah and still hold on to what is rightfully yours. Lending to...
Two short verses sit side by side: do not revile God, do not curse a ruler of your people. The Sages turn them over and find a forest of meaning. First, the word for "God," Elohim,...
"Your fullness and your tithe-offering you shall not delay." A farmer in the Land of Israel stands before a harvest already promised away in pieces. Some belongs to the priest, som...
One short line, "so you shall do with your ox," sends the Sages reaching back and forth between the human firstborn and the firstborn beast. Each teaches us about the other. If a s...
A single phrase, "it shall be yours," carries a heavy ruling. Two brothers who hold their herds in common, or any partners who share a flock, are exempt from the tithe of cattle. T...
"And men of holiness shall you be to Me." The verse could read as a compliment or a destiny, but the Sages hear in it a working relationship between Israel and the Holy One, blesse...
