2,211 passages in Rabbinic Midrash
Individual passages from Yalkut Shimoni on Torah, shown in source order. Page 36 of 47.
The verse "They shall not dwell in your land" sounds like a blanket ban, and one might assume it even excludes a gentile who has renounced idolatry. The sages cut against that read...
When God summoned Moses, Aaron, Nadab, and Abihu up the mountain, the sages noticed the order of the procession and read a secret into it. Moses and Aaron walked ahead, and the two...
What exactly happened at the foot of Sinai when Israel brought offerings to seal the covenant? The schools of Shammai and Hillel could not agree. Were these the festival offerings ...
Before Israel could enter the covenant, Moses dashed sacrificial blood upon the people. The sages drew a quiet but enormous lesson from this: there is no sprinkling without immersi...
When the elders "saw the God of Israel," they glimpsed beneath His feet something like a pavement of sapphire. Why sapphire? The rabbis link this verse to another that calls the ta...
The verse says God did not lay His hand upon the nobles of Israel, and Rabbi Pinchas catches the implication at once: if Scripture troubles to say He withheld His hand, then they h...
A single word can reveal how a leader sees the people around him. When Moses left the elders behind before ascending the mountain, he told them, "Wait here for us," gathering himse...
The midrash imagines Moses speaking plainly to the elders he leaves at the foot of the mountain. Their waiting is not idleness and not for their own sake. "See to what kind of plac...
A verse about Moses leaving Aaron and Hur to handle disputes becomes the seedbed of a foundational rule of Jewish law. "Whoever has a cause to plead, let him approach them." Rabbi ...
The verse that names Moses, Aaron, Nadab, Abihu, and seventy unnamed elders becomes the anchor for one of the most famous power struggles in the rabbinic world. Two witnesses testi...
When Moses climbed Sinai, he did not simply walk up a mountain. He entered a cloud, was wrapped inside it, and was made holy within it. The sages understood this as a deliberate se...
Rabbi Shimon ben Yochai pointed to a single sharp contrast hidden inside two verses. At Sinai the glory of God looked like a devouring fire blazing on the mountaintop, and yet the ...
Rabbi Abba bar Kahana described what the glory at Sinai really looked like. It was not a single sheet of flame but seven walls of fire, each glittering inside the next, layer withi...
Rabbi Yishmael laid out a pattern that runs from the first man down through the kings of Israel. Before Adam sinned, every beast and bird feared him; afterward the fear flipped, an...
Two verses seem to collide. One says Moses could not enter the Tent of Meeting because the cloud had settled upon it. Another says Moses entered into the very midst of the cloud on...
Rabbi Yochanan was walking up from Tiberias to Sepphoris, leaning on the shoulder of his student Rabbi Chiya bar Abba. They passed a field, and he said it had once been his, sold s...
The portion that opens with the call to bring an offering is read alongside a verse from Proverbs: God has given Israel a good acquisition, the Torah, which they must never abandon...
A merchant who buys goods and sets out on the road lives in fear of robbers. But Torah, the sages said, is a treasure no bandit can seize. Can thieves take a person's Torah out of ...
A merchant borrows money, buys a load of goods, and sets out on the road. Some days the road repays him. Other days it ruins him. The Torah, the sages say, never works that way. A ...
The sages notice that one tiny word changes everything. The verse could have read simply, "Let them take a portion." Instead it reads, "Let them take a portion for Me" (Exodus 25:2...
The phrase "for Me" carries more than permanence. It carries blessing. Whatever God calls His own grows beyond what the giver could expect, and the offering for the Tabernacle prov...
A paradox sits at the heart of the command. The God who owns the earth and everything in it, to whom the sea belongs because He made it, to whom the very heavens belong, turns to a...
When the people brought their thirteen kinds of material for the Tabernacle, gold and silver, blue and purple and crimson, they might have imagined they were balancing an account. ...
The list of offering materials hides a vision of history. Read in sequence, the sages say, the metals map the empires that would rule over Israel. Gold is Babylon, called "the head...
The threefold pattern keeps returning. The sages connect the three offerings hinted in the Torah to a practical rhythm of the Temple. Three times a year the officials would draw fu...
God reminds Israel of a hidden bargain. "The Torah was Mine," He says, quoting the verse that the Torah of the LORD should be in their mouths. "And justice was Mine too, for judgme...
When the Torah lists the materials for the Mishkan, it pauses on a small craft detail that the sages refuse to let pass quietly. Among the offerings are rams' skins dyed red, and f...
A craft question turns into a riddle about the nature of a single animal. Everything used for the sanctuary had to come from a pure source, since the same hides that wrapped the ho...
A passing mention of the gems for the priestly garments unlocks one of the great stories of honoring a parent. The discussion begins with a legal puzzle about whether a red heifer ...
The command that gives the whole sanctuary its meaning is just a few words: build Me a holy place, and I will live among you. The sages anchor it in a later verse. When Moses saw t...
Three times, the sages teach, a command from God so stunned Moses that he stepped back. The first was the order to build a sanctuary. How, Moses protested, when the highest heavens...
A short verse about how peace-offerings must be slaughtered while the sanctuary doors stand open opens a wider study of names. The verse speaks of the Tabernacle, the portable tent...
The instruction that Moses build everything "according to the pattern I show you" turns out to govern far more than the original Tabernacle. The phrase ends with the words even so ...
The Torah commands an ark of acacia wood, and the sages first ask why one verse says "you shall make" while another says "they shall make." The singular speaks to a time when Israe...
How big was the ark Moses built, and what did it really hold? The sages take a ruler to the question. The tablets, six handbreadths square and three thick, lay along the floor of t...
Why wood, of all materials, for the ark that would hold the tablets? Because the Torah is called a tree of life, and so the vessel that cradles it is itself drawn from living wood....
Some sacred objects are made to be portable, but the ark's carrying poles were different. Once fitted into their rings, they could be loosened but never pulled free. Rabbi Eleazar ...
The sages weigh the strange double nature of Israel. The same generosity that emptied their pockets for the golden calf also emptied them for the Tabernacle. Rabbi Aha bar Abba thr...
What did the cherubim atop the ark actually look like, and how high did their wings reach? The sages probe both. Rabbi Abbahu offered a surprising answer for the word cherub. It me...
God promised to meet Moses and speak from above the ark's cover. Rabbi Yose drew a startling principle from the geometry. The ark stood nine handbreadths tall, the cover added one,...
Two verses seem to fight. One says God spoke to Moses from the Tent of Meeting; another says God spoke from above the ark's cover, between the cherubim. Which was it? The sages tea...
A man wandered about repeating a bittersweet proverb of love. When our love was at its height, he said, the two of us could rest together on the blade of a sword. But once the love...
The priests are at work in the Sanctuary, twelve loaves stacked on a golden table, each one folded so its length spanned the table's width, braced by golden posts and threaded with...
The command sounded simple enough, make a lampstand of pure gold, but the sages turned it over like jewelers inspecting a stone. Could it be silver if gold ran short? Copper, iron,...
Solomon's Temple held a startling abundance, ten golden lampstands where the wilderness Tabernacle had held only one. Where did they stand? If you imagine five flanking the right o...
How much of the great golden lampstand had to be beaten from one single block? The sages parse it almost coin by coin. The body and its seven lamps, all agree, were drawn from the ...
The word the Torah uses for the lampstand is "hammered," and the rabbis hear in it something hard and unyielding, the work of a craftsman pounding metal into shape with a hammer, n...
Solomon's mother, the verse says, crowned him on his wedding day, yet Rabbi Yitzhak searched all of Scripture and found no such crown. So he read the words another way. The King to...
