2,211 passages in Rabbinic Midrash
Individual passages from Yalkut Shimoni on Torah, shown in source order. Page 35 of 47.
Two holiness verses are laid against each other, and out of the comparison the Sages draw a precise rule about meat cooked in milk. Rabbi Shimon teaches that such a mixture is forb...
Two great masters, Rabbi Yochanan and Reish Lakish, divide the verses about forbidden flesh between them, and their disagreement is not hairsplitting. It decides how many prohibiti...
Why does the Torah say "flesh torn in the field" when an animal can just as easily be torn inside a barn? The Sages refuse to let the word "field" shrink the law. By comparing the ...
In the town of Tzippori there was a butcher with a profitable trade in deception. He sold his neighbors meat from animals that had died on their own or been torn apart, passing off...
The Torah commands that torn flesh be thrown "to the dog," and the sages turn the small word over in their hands. Rabbi Yehudah hears a limit in it: this you give the dog, but not ...
One short verse, one sharp lesson. "You shall not carry a false report," says the Torah, and the sages refuse to let the listener off the hook. The plain ear hears only a command a...
A judge who has heard only one party has already failed, the sages warn. "Then both men shall stand" (Deuteronomy 19:17): the dispute belongs in the open, with both litigants prese...
"You shall not follow a majority to do evil." From this single line, the sages draw the whole architecture of the court. Stitching together verses about the "congregation" that jud...
The duty to return a lost object comes with two practical safeguards the sages draw straight from the verse. First, you do not simply surrender the item to whoever shows up claimin...
The companion law to the lost animal is the burdened one. You come upon a donkey collapsed under a load too heavy for it, the owner struggling beside it. The Torah will not let you...
The Torah commands a judge not to bend the verdict against the poor man in his lawsuit. But the rabbis press on the wording. One verse already warns against favoring a poor litigan...
One short command, "Keep far from a false matter," and the rabbis hear in it an entire code of judicial honesty. The verse does not merely forbid lying outright. It demands distanc...
The same brief verse, "Keep far from a false matter," yields yet another lesson. A court is only as honest as the minds that sit on it. If a presiding judge seats an unlearned coll...
The verse "Keep far from a false matter" keeps unfolding. In one reading, a judge must not station a partisan advocate at his side, for the Torah insists that the cause of both par...
"The innocent and the righteous you shall not slay." The rabbis hear two distinct commands in the doubled phrase, and they pull the court toward mercy. A convicted man on his way t...
The Torah's ban on bribery slams shut an obvious loophole. A judge might tell himself, "I will pocket the gift but rule honestly all the same." The verse answers before he can fini...
Could a judge ever take money from both parties and still be clean? The Talmud tells of Karna, who collected a coin from each litigant before hearing their case. The discussion cir...
Bribery, the rabbis insist, is not only about money. The verse says "take no bribe" rather than "take no unjust gain," and from that wording they learn that even a bribe of words, ...
Rabbi Ishmael reads the simple command, "Six years you shall sow," as a hidden ledger of reward and punishment. When Israel keeps faith with God, the math is generous: work the lan...
In the seventh year the land changes hands without changing owners. The verse splits its demand in two: stop working the field, and step back from claiming its fruit as your own. T...
Two verses seem to argue with each other. One throws the seventh-year harvest open to the needy of the people; the other speaks of the food belonging to you and your household. The...
The verse first gets parsed into the dirt of real farming. To release the field is to leave off weeding; to let it lie fallow is to stop clearing away stones. The Sages even split ...
The verse about six days of work sits, almost surprisingly, inside the laws of the seventh year. The midrash explains why. The weekly Sabbath, the one rooted in Creation itself, mu...
A dispute opens over a delicate question: may a Jewish household keep slaves who have not been circumcised? Rabbi Ishmael says yes and points to the verse promising rest to the son...
The verse "in all that I have said to you, take heed" sounds almost like a closing flourish, but the Sages press it for hidden weight. They link it to the command about arranging t...
The command "you shall do no manner of work" on the Sabbath seems clear enough until you ask how far it reaches. Read narrowly, it would cover only the great primary categories of ...
The verse warns, "In all that I have said to you, take heed." The Sages press on that word "all" and ask what it adds beyond what we already know about resting on the festival. The...
Three times a year, the Torah commands, every man shall come up and stand before the LORD. The Sages took this single line and turned it carefully in their hands, asking exactly wh...
The middle days of Passover and Sukkot sit in a curious place. They are not the festival's bright opening or its closing crown, yet they are not ordinary days either. The Sages wre...
When a pilgrim came up to the Temple, the Torah forbade arriving "empty." But what fills that emptiness? Could a pair of birds or a measure of flour suffice? The Sages weighed the ...
The Sages first note a small but firm point about the calendar: the three pilgrimage festivals must stay fixed in their seasons, never shifted aside even by the laws of the Sabbati...
When Rav Huna came to certain verses, he could not read them without weeping. A servant whose master longs to see him, and the servant keeps his distance. That was the picture that...
The Torah ties two ritual moments together: "You shall not offer the blood of My sacrifice with leavened bread." Rabbi Yishmael reads it as a sharp command about timing. Do not sla...
Two Sages each found a knot in Scripture and worked to untie it. Rav Huna noticed a tension in the law of the festival fat. The verse forbids the fat to remain until morning, which...
Scripture commands that the choicest of the year's harvest be carried up to the Temple (Exodus 23:19), and the sages mined that single verse for a whole law of belonging. The quest...
The Torah states the command "you shall not boil a kid in its mother's milk" three separate times, and the rabbis refused to let those repetitions sit idle. Nothing in Scripture is...
Having established that "do not boil a kid" is written three times, the sages now read those repetitions to set the reach of the law. One verse, they say, fixes that the prohibitio...
The sages turn next to the single word "kid" and to the precise spelling of "its mother's milk." The written Hebrew could almost be read as "its mother's fat," so the rabbis weigh ...
The rabbis keep widening the milk law beyond a literal mother and her offspring. If the verse says only "in its mother's milk," how do we know it is also forbidden to cook a kid's ...
Where in the Torah does it actually say that a mixture of meat and milk may not be eaten, or even used for any benefit at all? The Talmudic sages, gathered here by Yalkut Shimoni, ...
After the sin of the golden calf, God tells Moses, "Behold, I send an angel before you" (Exodus 23:20), and the sages hear in those words both a demotion and a mercy. God explains ...
The verse warns Israel, "Take heed of him and obey his voice; do not rebel against him" (Exodus 23:21), and the midrash reads it as a sharp reproach folded into a command. The mess...
When Israel learned that the conquest of the land might be entrusted to an angel, the warning chilled them: this messenger "will not pardon your transgression." An angel does only ...
How do we know that blessing God over food is rooted in the Torah itself, and not merely a later custom? The sages turned the verse over until it gave up its secret. Scripture says...
A folk proverb caught the sages' ear: sixty runners set out at full speed, yet they never caught the man who had eaten his breakfast. The Rabbis agreed and added their counsel: ris...
On the last day of his life Moses gathered Israel and said, "I am a hundred and twenty years old this day." The sages would not let that small word "this day" pass without meaning....
Shimon ben Azzai once found a hidden scroll in Jerusalem, and in it a startling line: King Manasseh killed the prophet Isaiah. One sage explained that Manasseh first put him on tri...
God's promise on the eve of entering the land was a weapon of pure dread. "I will send My terror before you and throw all the peoples into confusion." The sages took this literally...
