2,211 passages in Rabbinic Midrash
Individual passages from Yalkut Shimoni on Torah, shown in source order. Page 44 of 47.
The Torah says the bull of the sin-offering is carried outside the camp to be burned, and the sages press on a single phrase. The wilderness camp of Israel was arranged in three co...
Where exactly does the priest burn the remains of the bull once they are carried out of the camp? The Torah names a pure place where the ashes are poured, and the sages unfold each...
The teaching opens with the word fire and ends with the gravest responsibility a court can bear. First the sages compare how the word fire is read in different verses. In one place...
What happens when not one person but whole tribes go astray on the word of their court? The Torah turns the law of the individual sin-offering into a law for the nation, and the sa...
The verse says the elders of the congregation shall press their hands on the head of the bull that atones for the whole community. But which elders, and how many? The sages refuse ...
Two communal sin-offerings sit side by side: the bull brought when the whole nation errs through its court's ruling, and the goats brought when the community has slipped into idola...
A few words of the verse carry exact instructions for where this offering happens. "Before the LORD" is not a vague gesture toward the Divine Presence everywhere; the sages read it...
One verse instructs the priest to do to the second bull exactly as he did to the first, and the sages press hard on that single command "so shall he do." From the repetition they d...
The discussion keeps circling a single, demanding question: which steps of the offering are so essential that skipping them voids everything? The phrase "to the bull," applied to b...
The Torah says the priest shall dip his finger in the blood. The sages hear in "dip" a quiet exclusion: dipping, and not merely wiping the finger along the edge of the vessel. Then...
Once the blood has done its work inside, the bull's body is carried away and burned outside the camp. The sages fix the spot precisely: not just beyond the inner court but beyond a...
Rabban Yochanan ben Zakkai turns a law about a ruler's offering into praise of an entire age. Happy is the generation, he says, whose prince brings a sin-offering when he stumbles ...
The Torah's wording about the inadvertent sinner is not careless. When Leviticus says both "he does one of them" and "he does of these," the Sages hear two phrases doing two jobs. ...
How many sin-offerings does one inadvertent stretch of sinning produce? The Sages count with surgical care. Forbidden fat and blood eaten together, whether memory lapsed once or tw...
A leader has sinned without realizing it. Who has the standing to open his eyes? The verse says his sin must be "made known to him," and the Sages turn that phrase over carefully. ...
What does a person do when conscience whispers that something may have gone wrong, but memory cannot say what? Leviticus answers with one of the most humane institutions in the sac...
The Sages keep probing the edges of inadvertent sin. Rabbi Shimon Shezuri insists that when only one prohibition is at stake the offender is plainly liable; the real argument is ab...
The ruler's sin-offering is fixed by a single word. Leviticus prescribes "a male goat," and the Sages press on every syllable. Not a female goat. Not a substituted animal swapped i...
Before the goat is offered, the one who brings it presses his hands upon its head. The Sages stretch this gesture to reach beyond the ruler's offering. Rabbi Yehuda extends it to t...
Place matters. The ruler's sin-offering must be slaughtered "in the place where the burnt-offering is slaughtered," which means the northern side of the altar. The Sages already kn...
The Torah commands that the blood of the sin offering be poured out at the base of the great outer altar, the altar of the burnt offering, and not at the base of the inner golden a...
"And he shall be forgiven" carries a hidden warning. Atonement is not a vague mood that hovers over a crowd. One offering covers one soul, and a priest cannot piggyback two people'...
The phrase "the common people" does heavy lifting. By naming the ordinary Israelite, the Torah quietly excludes the king and the anointed high priest from this particular sin offer...
The Torah pins liability to "the commandments of the LORD," and the sages hear in that phrase a sharp boundary. Transgressing a king's decree or a court's edict is no sacrificial s...
The Torah says the ordinary Israelite brings a she-goat for his sin offering, but it never spells out the animal's age. The sages set out to fill the gap by comparison, and the cha...
The act of laying hands on the offering's head is not reserved for one kind of sin; the wording stretches to include even the sin offering brought for idolatry. From there the law ...
The fat of the lamb sin offering is removed exactly as for the peace offering, and its atonement carries the same conditions: one offering for one soul, the priest atoning for hims...
Resh Lakish would lie face down in the study house, wrestling with a paradox about offerings slaughtered under the wrong intention, not for the purpose they were dedicated to. If s...
The Torah turns the ordinary expectation of guilt on its head. Imagine one man urging another, "Go worship idols." Surely the tempter is the guilty one. Yet the sages read the vers...
A man knows the truth that could settle another's claim, and five separate times, out on the street, he is solemnly adjured to come forward. Five times he turns away. Then he walks...
An oath does not need the holy tongue to take hold of a soul. The sages anchor this in the verse itself: a person hears the adjuration "in whatever language she hears," and that he...
Two honest witnesses, each holding a piece of the truth - when do their accounts fuse into a single binding testimony? The sages probe this with care. One school insists the two mu...
The law sets a quiet but demanding test for a witness: he must be fit at the beginning and fit at the end. If a man held his knowledge while still an outsider but later married int...
A false oath does not vanish into the air. Zechariah saw it take shape as a scroll so vast it soared across the sky, larger than the hide of any elephant or camel, sailing out from...
Not every brush with impurity makes a person answerable before the sanctuary. The Torah lists three carcasses - of a wild beast, a domestic animal, and a creeping thing - and the e...
The single word "unclean" carries enormous weight in the sages' reading. Standing beside each carcass - wild beast, domestic animal, creeping thing - it stretches the law beyond th...
The Torah speaks of a person who becomes ritually impure, and the sages read every word of the verse as a doorway. "A man" turns out to mean a corpse. "The uncleanness of a man" be...
How do the sages know that the sliding-scale offering of Leviticus 5 applies specifically to a person who entered the Sanctuary or ate sacred food while impure, and not to every ki...
Two great teachers reach the same verdict by two different roads. Resh Lakish and Rabbi Yochanan both rule that the flesh of a corpse conveys impurity whether it is still moist or ...
An oath is not magic. The Torah ties its binding force to the small words "to do evil or to do good," and the sages pull a whole framework out of that pairing. Since doing good is ...
Here the sages set two kinds of sacred speech side by side and find a sharp difference between them. A vow can do what an oath cannot. If a person declares the benefit of the sukka...
Can a person be punished for an oath about something already done? Rabbi Yishmael and Rabbi Akiva take opposite sides, and their dispute traces back to the very method each one lea...
How much of an oath happens in the heart, and how much must reach the air? Shmuel rules that even a person who has fully made up his mind inside still has to bring the words out th...
When does one sin become many, and when do many sins collapse into one? The Torah's small word "for one" teaches that a person can be liable for each separate offense, even the lig...
The Torah's sliding-scale offering bends toward the person who cannot afford much. A rich man brings a ewe-lamb or a female goat; the poor brings two birds; the destitute brings on...
The Sifra reads tenderness into a single phrase. When the verse says "enough for a sheep," it teaches that the court must never tell a struggling sinner, "go borrow money," or "go ...
A puzzle sits inside the poor man's offering. When the sinner is wealthy, he brings a single animal, a lamb or a goat. So you might expect that when he is poor, he would likewise b...
The two birds could easily have been read as a matched pair serving one purpose. Since both arrive in place of the single animal a wealthier sinner would offer, you might assume bo...
