2,211 passages in Rabbinic Midrash
Individual passages from Yalkut Shimoni on Torah, shown in source order. Page 4 of 47.
The single verse that says the LORD built the rib becomes a study in how women were formed and what was placed within them. Because the verb is to build, the sages read it as an ac...
When God built Eve, the sages picture not a plain handoff but a royal wedding. He adorned her with twenty-four kinds of ornaments, the same finery the prophet describes as every pr...
Adam's words bone of my bones become a doorway into the bond of marriage and the holiness woven into language itself. One playful reading hears in this time a wife who clatters aga...
This unit moves from the verse one flesh into the laws that govern marriage among the descendants of Noah, the framework the sages applied to humanity before Sinai. The discussion ...
The serpent's cunning is read as a height from which to fall. Once he stood upright on legs, more clever than any creature, and could have carried a man's goods to market and back....
This short unit reads a single repeated verb, was, as a quiet prophecy of destiny. Wherever Scripture says a figure was, the sages hear that he stood prepared for what came next. T...
While Eve spoke with the serpent, where was Adam? The midrash says he had fallen asleep, and that God meanwhile led the first man across the whole earth, pointing out where land wa...
The serpent had no argument that God forbade the tree. So he invented one. From this very tree, he whispered, the Holy One Himself ate, and with that power He made the world. He wa...
Were Adam and Eve blind before, that Scripture says their eyes were now opened? The midrash answers with a picture. A man swings his staff and shatters a glazier's whole basket of ...
When Adam sinned, something larger than one man's fate shifted. The midrash teaches that the Divine Presence had its true home below, here, among us on the earth. But Adam's sin dr...
When God calls into the garden, Where are you, the question is not about a hiding place. The midrash hears it as a reproach about direction. Only yesterday, it says, your reach spa...
God's question, Who told you that you were naked, comes wrapped in a parable. A woman borrows vinegar from a scholar's wife and is told there is one barrel her husband forbids her,...
The sages found a single law running through many ruins. A woman who sets her gaze on a man who is not hers ends up losing the husband she had; she reaches for what is forbidden an...
God speaks to Adam, to Eve, and to the serpent, but the conversation is not the same in each case. With Adam and Eve there is questioning, a chance to answer. With the serpent ther...
The serpent's curse, the sages say, is written even on its skin, those scales being a kind of leprosy, and it is cursed more deeply than every other animal. To measure that, the mi...
The sages mapped the hidden clockwork of life: how long each creature carries its young, and which tree quietly keeps the same calendar. The hen and the almond run twenty-one days....
When the Holy One, blessed be He, sentenced the serpent to crawl on its belly, the ruling angels descended and cut away its hands and feet. Its scream rolled from one edge of the w...
The sages count the days of pregnancy with care, two hundred and seventy-one, seventy-two, or seventy-three, and debate whether animals keep a fixed term at all. One student even c...
The Rabbis ask a pointed question: why were the three commandments of lamp, dough-offering, and menstrual purity placed especially in a woman's hands? Their answer reaches all the ...
From a single word in Eve's verse, her desire toward her husband, the Rabbis open a window onto four great longings woven through creation. The first is the love of a wife, drawn t...
In the throes of labor a woman makes a desperate vow: never again will she draw near to her husband. The Holy One, blessed be He, answers gently, you shall return to your desire fo...
The Rabbis read every word of Adam's sentence with precision. He did not merely listen to his wife's words but to her voice, her weeping that pressed him past reason. And his failu...
God names the bitter harvest that will now meet Adam: the thorn and the thistle, prickly weeds that grow in dense, crowding rows where once there was only abundance. The Rabbis hea...
The rabbis read healing into the body itself. A sneeze, a sweat, the easing of a fever, deep sleep, a dream that brings rest: these are good signs for one who is ill, each anchored...
One word, two faces. When Adam named his wife Chavah, the name carried a double meaning the rabbis could not let pass. On one side stands chiyut, life itself. She was given to him ...
The verse calls Eve "the mother of all living," and the sages turned the phrase every direction. Rabbi Shimon ben Elazar heard "with all the living": a wife rises with her husband'...
In the famous variant copied into Rabbi Meir's own Torah scroll, the garments God made for Adam were not garments of skin but garments of light. The Hebrew words for skin and light...
After the serpent was punished, the rabbis said it shed its skin, and from that very hide God fashioned garments of honor for Adam and his wife. The instrument of their fall became...
Rabbi Berekhiah told a startling secret about the order of creation. When God set out to make the world, the very first thing He shaped was Adam. But God formed him only as a golem...
The garments of skin, on this reading, were no ordinary clothes. They were priestly vestments, the same kind of holy linen the Torah later assigns to the High Priest on the Day of ...
Why was Adam expelled from Eden? The midrash offers a sharp little parable that cuts past sin and punishment to something subtler. A king had a trusted steward and handed him autho...
A king marries a bride and, out of love, fashions for her a necklace strung with pearls. She betrays him. He takes the necklace back and writes out the document that ends the marri...
What did Scripture mean when it said the man had become "like one of Us" (Genesis 3:22)? Rabbi Pappias proposed: like one of the ministering angels. Rabbi Akiva shut that down at o...
The verse places the cherubim east of the garden, and the rabbis hear in it a claim about origins: this is where the angels themselves were first created. They link it to Ezekiel's...
One reading places Gehinnom itself east of Eden, created on the second day of creation, while the garden came on the third. The flaming sword now points toward the fire of judgment...
The Torah's wording is deliberately odd. It does not simply say "he knew Eve his wife." It says "and the man knew Eve his wife," naming Adam in full. The rabbis seize on that fulln...
The rabbis count three wonders crammed into a single day. Adam and Eve were created, came together, and brought forth children, all in one stretch of hours. Two climbed onto the be...
The argument about Noah's descendants and their sacrifices does not stay in the days of Cain and Abel. It reaches forward into the Exodus. When Moses confronts Pharaoh, he demands ...
The Torah says God "turned" to Abel and his offering but did not turn to Cain and his (Genesis 4:4). The rabbis read "turned" as "was reconciled." Abel won God's favor. Cain did no...
Some verses in the Torah have a grammar that refuses to settle. Does "lifting up" belong to the first clause or the second? Is "cursed" attached to the ox or to the anger? Issi ben...
Samuel pictured the evil inclination as a single grain of wheat lodged at the entrances of the heart, crouching at the door just as Scripture warns. Before that, while the child st...
What could the only two brothers on earth possibly fight about when the whole world was theirs to share? The Sages offer competing answers. One tradition says they split the world ...
The plural word "bloods" keeps echoing. Rabbi Yudan and the Rabbis trace it through later Scripture: Naboth's bloods, the bloods of the son of Jehoiada, never a single death but al...
Three figures in Scripture, the Sages say, came before God arguing that the verdict against them was unjust: Cain, Esau, and Manasseh. Cain protested that his punishment was unbear...
When the creatures of the world gather to demand justice for spilled blood, God protects Cain with a strange ruling. Cain killed, the Sages note, but he was the first to do so and ...
The names in Cain's line, the Sages say, are not neutral genealogy but a roll call of doom. Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi reads each one as God's own threat against that wicked generatio...
A heretic tries to trap Rabbi Yishmael with a grammatical oddity: why does the verse say the LORD rained fire "from the LORD" rather than simply "from Himself"? Is this two powers?...
When the first human being lay newly formed before his Maker, the Holy One, blessed be He, did not show him only the garden. He unrolled the whole future like a scroll. Generation ...
