2,211 passages in Rabbinic Midrash
Individual passages from Yalkut Shimoni on Torah, shown in source order. Page 38 of 47.
A Caesar who despised the Jews summoned his court with a sly question. If a man has a sore on his foot, should he cut off the foot and live, or keep it and suffer? His advisers cau...
A man tells his wife, my property goes to you and your children. How much is hers? Rav Yosef ruled she takes half, and he proved it from the priesthood. Scripture says of the sacre...
The verse tells the priests to eat the consecrated portions, and through that eating the owners of the offerings are forgiven. Whatever is left untouched past its time must be burn...
The Torah declares that "whatever touches the altar shall become holy," and the rabbis pressed on exactly how far that holiness reaches. Does the altar consecrate anything at all t...
Why does the Torah bother to say "two lambs" each day when "lambs" already means at least two? The Sages hear in that extra word a quiet instruction about how holy work should be d...
Two altars stood in the sanctuary, and the Sages give each of them three names, as if a single object could carry more than one face. The small golden altar inside, only a cubit sq...
Resh Lakish makes a startling claim about the sinners of Israel: the fire of Gehinnom cannot take hold of them. How does he know? He reasons from the golden altar, the small inner ...
The Torah says of Aaron that "in the morning, in the morning, when he tends them" he is to attend to the lamps of the menorah, and the same passage speaks of burning the incense. B...
When was each of the holy furnishings first put into service? Rabbi Shimon teaches that the sanctuary's vessels were dedicated each in its proper way: the golden altar only with th...
Once a year, on Yom Kippur, the high priest places blood on the horns of the golden altar, and the Torah marks this rite with the words "once in the year." From those few words the...
The Sages notice that two verses sit side by side. First "Aaron shall make atonement upon its horns," and immediately after, "when you take up the sum of the children of Israel." T...
Why are the children of Israel likened to a heap of wheat? Because a farmer counts only what is precious. He does not tally his dung, his chaff, or his straw, only his baskets of w...
How many tribes were meant to give the half-shekel? The rabbis read it out of the very word for "this", whose letters add up to twelve, one coin for each tribe of Israel. From that...
Two paths run through the world, the rabbis say. One is the path of Esau, called a hedge of thorns. Pull at a thorn-stake from one side and it rips you from the other. So Esau the ...
Why a half-shekel, and why was it called a ransom for the soul? Rabbi Pinchas ben Levi reaches back to an old wound in the family of Jacob. When the brothers sold Joseph, Rachel's ...
The half-shekel had a calendar of its own. On the first of Adar heralds went out across the land to announce that the shekels were due. By the fifteenth, moneychangers set up their...
Why fix the call for shekels on the first of Adar, a full month before they were needed? The sages answer with a quiet lesson in timing. The communal offerings of the new year had ...
The Torah commands that each month's offerings be purchased from a new contribution, drawn fresh from the people. Since the new year of offerings began in Nisan, the call for sheke...
In the Temple courtyard stood thirteen chests shaped like shofars, each labeled for a different sacred fund. Two were for shekels, the new ones for the current year and the old one...
The shekels, once gathered, had to be guarded as carefully as they were given. For the long journey to Jerusalem the coins were converted into gold darics, lighter to carry. Why no...
Every year the half-shekels of all Israel flowed into the Temple treasury, and the priests faced a logistics problem worthy of any treasury manager: how to keep the money orderly, ...
A small daily act, rinsing the hands before a meal, is rooted here in something enormous. The verse commands the priests to wash their hands and feet at the bronze basin before app...
One bronze basin in the wilderness became ten in Solomon's Temple, and the sages read the growth as a sign of continuity rather than replacement. The five basins on the right and f...
The sages press a sharp question about priestly error. If a priest comes to serve in the Temple without first washing his hands and feet, what happens to the offering? The answer t...
The Torah says priests must wash their hands and feet, but how exactly does one wash both at once? The sages turn the question into a small choreography. One opinion has the priest...
The recipe for the holy anointing oil reads like a perfumer's ledger: five hundred units each of flowing myrrh, cassia, and fragrant cinnamon, plus two hundred and fifty of aromati...
Twelve log of oil, no more, and with that small measure Moses anointed an entire sanctuary. Rabbi Yehudah counts the ways the oil should have run out, absorbed by the pot, drunk up...
The Temple incense was no casual blend. The sages list its ingredients with the precision of a master apothecary: balm, onycha, galbanum, and frankincense at seventy maneh each, th...
Twice a year the incense of the Temple was tended like something alive. In the dry summer months it was scattered loose so it would not grow musty; in the rains it was heaped tight...
Three things, the Rabbis said, the Holy One proclaims with His own voice and not through any messenger: famine, abundance, and the choice of a leader. So when the verse opens, See,...
Resh Lakish noticed something about how the Torah and the rest of Scripture introduce people. Sometimes a name is set down and left to rest in dignity, the lineage given full and c...
A single phrase in the inventory of the Tabernacle's making, the service garments, opens onto a startling claim. Were it not for the priestly vestments, the sages say, not a surviv...
The command to keep the Sabbath came, the Rabbis stress, straight from the mouth of God to Moses, not through an angel and not through any messenger. That directness matters, becau...
Rav drew a tender rule of giving from a single word in the verse, to know. When you give someone a gift, you should let them know you are giving it. And he found the most beautiful...
Rabbi Shimon ben Yochai taught a striking distinction. Every other commandment the Holy One gave to Israel He gave openly, before all. The Sabbath alone He gave in secret, for the ...
What becomes of food cooked on the Sabbath? The sages drew a careful line. If a person cooked by honest mistake, the food may be eaten. If he cooked in deliberate defiance of the d...
The Sabbath verse seems blunt: profane it and you die. But the sages press it like a stone yielding water. If Scripture already gave us the punishment, where is the prohibition tha...
How many forbidden labors fill the Sabbath, and how does a single verse yield thirty-nine of them? This is the puzzle the sages turn over. Shmuel reads the death penalty itself as ...
Two verses pull against each other. One says work "shall be done" for six days, as if it happens on its own; the other commands "you shall labor." The sages hear in the gap a hinge...
Rabbi Yose son of Rabbi Hanina makes a startling claim: a gentile who keeps the Sabbath, before any commitment to enter the covenant, is liable to death. The reason is not that res...
A single line of Scripture holds a hidden struggle. Moses sits at the summit of Sinai for forty days, receiving the whole of Torah, and Rabbi Yohanan reveals what those days were r...
Why does the Torah describe the tablets as stone? Rabbi Elazar turns the material into a lesson about the learner. A student must make his cheeks like a stone that does not wear aw...
The Torah says the people saw that Moses "delayed," but the sages refuse to read the word so flatly. They split it open: do not hear "delayed," hear "the sixth has come." Before cl...
One small word, "this," runs like a thread through Israel's whole story. The sages trace it across three moments. With "this" they sinned, pointing at the calf and crying, "this Mo...
The verse says Aaron built an altar, but the rabbis read into that single word a man trapped between two terrible choices. What did Aaron see in that moment? He saw the body of Hur...
Before the calf was ever cast, there was a killing. The crowd that had grown frantic at Moses' delay first came not to Aaron but to Hur, demanding that he make them a god. Hur refu...
Read again what Aaron saw, the rabbis say, and you find a calculated delay. If he let the people build the thing themselves, one tossing in a pebble, another a stone, the work woul...
A third reading turns Aaron's gesture into deliberate self-sacrifice. If the people build the calf themselves, the guilt clings to them. So Aaron reasoned: better the blame fall on...
