2,211 passages in Rabbinic Midrash
Individual passages from Yalkut Shimoni on Torah, shown in source order. Page 39 of 47.
The Torah was completed and handed to Moses, and on the word "finished" the rabbis spin a meditation on what a scholar of that Torah should be. They reach for the image of a bride....
This long discourse circles the two tablets and never lets go of the wound beneath them. The tablets stand for paired things: heaven and earth, groom and bride, this world and the ...
God's command "Go down" is read by the rabbis as a demotion. Go down from your greatness, He tells Moses. The honor was never yours for your own sake; I gave it to you only for Isr...
Rabbi Berekhiah, in Rabbi Levi's name, sharpens the quarrel over whose people Israel really are. He tells of a king who leased his vineyard to a tenant farmer. When the harvest pro...
The rabbis of the Talmud turned the golden calf into a fine point of law. A man who declares of an idol "You are my god" is, according to Rabbi Akiva, liable to bring a sin offerin...
God says to Moses, "And now, let Me be" — and Rabbi Elazar hears in those three words something almost too bold to repeat. If the verse did not say it outright, no one would dare. ...
One short Hebrew word, vayechal, opens like a hand with many fingers. The sages refuse to settle on a single meaning and instead let it carry all of them at once. Some read it as i...
The words "let Me be" trouble the sages once more. No one was physically restraining God. So why would He speak as though someone were holding Him back and needed to release Him? T...
Moses argues like a lawyer who knows the case law. He reaches back to Abraham bargaining over Sodom, where God agreed to spare the city for fifty righteous men and let Himself be t...
The midrash hears the odd word acharai, "after Me," and turns it into a portrait of the perfect mediator. Moses is the man who rebuked God for Israel's sake and rebuked Israel for ...
Long before the golden calf, Pharaoh studied the stars and threw a warning at Israel as they prepared to leave Egypt: "See, evil is before your faces." The sages read this almost l...
When the people made the calf and the Holy One spoke of wiping them out, Moses did not point to his own record. He named the dead. "Remember Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, Your servan...
The verse calls the first tablets "the work of God" (Exodus 32:16), and the sages took the phrase at full weight. These stones were not quarried from any field on earth. They came ...
Two verses share a single word, and the sages let that word build a bridge between them. The tablets are called "the work of God" (Exodus 32:16). At Sinai, when the elders ascended...
"And the writing was the writing of God" (Exodus 32:16), and the sages held that the divine penmanship broke the rules of ordinary stone. The letters were not painted on the surfac...
"As he drew near the camp" and saw the calf, Moses threw down the tablets and broke them (Exodus 32:19). The sages fixed the date of that shattering to a day that would carry grief...
The sages list four steps Moses took on his own initiative, without an explicit order, only to learn afterward that Heaven had agreed with him all along. He broke the tablets, he s...
At the gate of the camp Moses drew a line: "Whoever is for the LORD, come to me" (Exodus 32:26). Rav Chisda read the whole tribe of Levi into that summons, holding that not one Lev...
Moses ends his plea with a sentence he leaves unfinished: "And now, if You will forgive their sin; and if not, blot me out of Your book" (Exodus 32:32). Rabbi Natan reads this as t...
When Moses pleaded for Israel after the Golden Calf, he offered his own life as collateral: erase me, but spare them. The sages heard in that one verse the architecture of every Ro...
Scripture says Moses took the Tent and pitched it far outside the camp, and the rabbis wanted to know what wound lay behind that distance. They linked it to a strange echo from the...
When Moses walked out to the Tent, the whole people stood and watched him go, their eyes fixed on his back until he disappeared. Two sages, Rabbi Ami and Rabbi Yitzchak, split over...
Why did Moses carry the Tent away from the camp? Resh Lakish read it as Moses's own anger. When he saw that the people had thrown away a precious gift, the intimacy of God dwelling...
When Moses walked to the Tent, the people lined the path in reverence. Happy is the mother who bore him, they said. And when the pillar of cloud came down at the entrance, everyone...
Moses pressed past every other request to the hardest one: show me Your glory, meaning, show me the rule by which You run the world. God's answer was a warning before a gift. You c...
When Moses asked to see God's glory, God set him in a cleft and said, behold, there is a place by Me. Rabbi Yosi ben Chalafta caught the precise wording. God did not say I am in th...
God told Moses plainly, you cannot see My face. The sages heard in that refusal an answer to two of Moses's deepest questions: what exactly is the reward waiting for those who keep...
At the cleft of the rock, Moses asks for the impossible: to see God's face directly. The answer comes with a sting that doubles as a lesson about timing. When I wanted you to look,...
Two men, separated by centuries, are linked by a single hollow in the rock. Moses stood in the cleft on Sinai while the Divine glory passed by; Elijah sheltered in a cave at Horeb,...
The Roman emperor probes Rabbi Yehoshua with a challenge dressed as curiosity. He concedes that the world must have an Owner who made heaven and earth. But then he presses: if God ...
When God tells Moses to carve a second set of tablets, the wording is curious: carve for yourself. The rabbis hear an unexpected gift hidden in those words. The chips and shavings ...
The teaching opens with a question from marriage law: when a man betroths a woman, who pays the scribe who writes the contract? The groom does. That custom becomes the key to under...
Students put a pointed question to Rabban Yochanan ben Zakkai. If the first tablets were entirely God's handiwork, why were the second carved by Moses? His answer is a parable abou...
A small detail in the second-tablets account becomes a large principle. As Moses prepares to ascend Sinai again, even the flocks and herds are forbidden to graze near the mountain....
One of the boldest images in all of rabbinic teaching opens this passage. Rabbi Yochanan says that if Scripture itself did not say it, no one would dare: when the LORD passed befor...
When Scripture wants to tell us that God is patient, it does not say He is slow to a single anger. It says He is long of nostrils, in the plural, and the sages heard a whole theolo...
Moses, standing in the cleft of the rock as the divine attributes passed before him, suddenly bowed his face to the ground. The sages asked the obvious question: of all the words G...
Rabbi Yose noticed that the verse speaks of God "bearing iniquity" in the singular, not iniquities. From that one missing letter he drew a startling image: when a person's sins and...
How much should a person actually hand over to the priest when redeeming a firstborn donkey? The law, Rav Nachman ruled, follows the Sages, and the lamb used can be almost anything...
A plain, unschooled man came to Rabbi Meir with a practical worry. With what does a person redeem a firstborn donkey? With a lamb, Rabbi Meir told him, just as the verse says. But ...
"Every firstborn of your sons you shall redeem." From that short command the sages built out the whole architecture of a father's obligations. If a father sets aside the redemption...
The Torah calls Sukkot the Festival of Ingathering and sets it "at the turning of the year," and from that phrase the sages built the rules for declaring a leap year. The autumn se...
Rabbi Eleazar laid down a rule that has comforted travelers for centuries. Those sent to perform a commandment are not harmed, not on the way there and not on the way home. The pro...
The verse promised that no one would covet your land while you climbed to Jerusalem, and the sages told stories to show the promise was real. One man left a coop full of chickens a...
Alongside the Passover lamb came a second offering, the festival sacrifice known as the chagigah. The anonymous teaching of the Mishnah gives it broad terms. It could come from the...
One verse says "write these words," the next breath says "by the mouth of these words." The sages heard in that pairing the whole architecture of Jewish learning. Rabbi Eleazar arg...
The Yalkut Shimoni, a massive compilation of rabbinic commentary on the entire Hebrew Bible, offers a fascinating glimpse. In its section on Torah portion 405, it says something qu...
Forty days and forty nights on the mountain, with no food and no water. The midrash asks the obvious question: how could any human being survive it? The answer reframes the whole e...
