2,211 passages in Rabbinic Midrash
Individual passages from Yalkut Shimoni on Torah, shown in source order. Page 45 of 47.
When a person owes both a sin offering and a burnt offering, which comes first? The Torah seems to answer twice, once by calling the sin offering "first" and once by labeling the b...
The rite of the bird sin offering turns on a single anatomical word, and the Sifra is not content to leave it vague. The priest pinches the bird's neck "opposite its nape," and the...
For the bird sin offering, the blood is not collected in a vessel; the priest holds the head in one part of his grip and the body in another and sprinkles from the creature itself ...
The great altar in the Temple had four corners reaching toward heaven. When a poor person brought a bird as a sin-offering, the priest did not perform the rite just anywhere. There...
When a person brought two birds to atone, one was offered as a sin-offering and the other as a burnt-offering. Rava noticed something puzzling. If the person had not truly repented...
Two birds, two fates. One became a sin-offering, the other a burnt-offering, and though they began as identical creatures, the rituals that carried them up to God were not the same...
The Torah makes room for the poor. If a sinner cannot afford a lamb, he brings two birds; if he cannot even manage that, he brings a simple handful of flour, a tenth of an ephah. R...
The sliding scale of offerings might tempt a person to draw a harsh conclusion. If the rich bring a lamb and the poor bring flour, perhaps the size of the offering measures the siz...
An ordinary Israelite who brought a meal-offering for a sin watched the priest take a handful for the altar and then eat the rest. But what happens when the sinner is himself a pri...
The Torah's law of trespass against sacred property opens onto a calculation that turns dread into wonder. A person who unknowingly benefits from something consecrated, even by the...
How small a benefit can pile up into a trespass against the sacred? The sages ruled that bites and benefits taken from consecrated property combine across time, even if one ate tod...
When the Torah commands the guilt-offering, it pegs its worth in silver shekels: a ram of fixed value brought for a fixed sin (Leviticus 5:15). From that one anchor the Sages recon...
If a person mistakenly uses something dedicated to the Sanctuary, the Torah requires repayment plus an added fifth (Leviticus 5:16). The Sages read every phrase closely to fix the ...
The sages gather the laws of the added fifth across four very different sins: robbery, eating heave-offering, consecrated property, and tithe. The Sages compare what Scripture writ...
How do you measure the reward waiting for the righteous in the world to come? Rabbi Yose answers by working backward from punishment. Adam was given a single prohibition, broke it ...
A pious farmer forgot a single sheaf in his field and was so overjoyed that he sent his son to offer two bulls in thanksgiving. The son was baffled. Why celebrate this accident mor...
The sages fix the worth of the guilt-offering by tying it through a verbal link to the sin-offering, and along the way it reveals a quiet asymmetry in the sacrificial system. The s...
The Sages picture a man facing two paths, one ritually impure and one pure, and he cannot tell which is which. He walks the first, enters the Sanctuary, undergoes the full purifica...
What happens to a suspensive guilt-offering once the doubt that prompted it is resolved? The Sages read the doubled phrase "he is certainly guilty" (Leviticus 5:19) to handle every...
The Torah does not waste a word. When it lays out the law of one who swears falsely about his neighbor's property, it says 'his neighbor' not once but twice, and the sages press ha...
The verse opens with a startling phrase: a man who lies to his neighbor about money has committed 'a trespass against the LORD.' Cheat a person, and you have wronged Heaven. From t...
A man steals a field, and before he can return it a river floods and ruins the land. Must he hand over a different field to make his victim whole? Rabbi Eliezer says yes. The Sages...
Rav Chisda opens with a quiet detail. The law of the denied deposit applies sharply when the owner set aside a specific vessel for the loan or the withheld payment. From there the ...
The verse commands the robber to make things right, and it commands him to do so without delay. The instant he confesses his guilt, the clock starts: he must restore what he took. ...
What happens when a thief takes raw material and transforms it, turning stolen beams into furniture or stolen wool into cloth? Does the change of form make the object legally his, ...
By the strict letter of Torah law, says Rabbi Yochanan, even a stolen object that has been changed should be returned in its original state. So why does the Mishnah rule that a thi...
The rabbis insist that stolen goods be returned exactly as they were taken, and from that they unfold the duties of restitution. If a man robs food and feeds it to his children, th...
A man is entrusted with his neighbor's property, and when it is asked for, he lies. He says it was stolen, swears that the theft is no fault of his, and walks away clean. Then the ...
A man stands surrounded by claimants. Five people press in, each naming what he holds of theirs: a deposit, a pledge given against a loan, something he stole, something he found an...
Why open the laws of the offerings with the verse, "Who in the sky can be compared to the LORD"? Because, the midrash says, Balaam tried to compare himself, and lost. Balaam fashio...
The golden calf left a stain on Aaron. Scripture says the LORD was "very angry with Aaron, to destroy him," and the rabbis read that destruction not as Aaron's own death but as the...
"This is the Torah of the burnt offering." The rabbis hear in those plain words both a promise and a longing. A friend honors a king with a barrel of wine and a basket of figs, and...
The rabbis keep turning the same short verse, and each turn yields a new flavor of devotion. "As in the days of old" sends them back to Noah after the flood, and "as in former year...
For more than a century, the rabbis say, the fire clung to the altar without ever consuming it. The wood did not burn away, the copper did not melt, and any moisture that gathered ...
The order of the verses is itself the lesson. Just before "This is the Torah of the burnt offering," the Torah deals with the thief who must restore what he stole. Put the two side...
The Torah gives the burnt offering a name that is also a verb. Olah means "the one that rises," and the rabbis hear in that single word the whole logic of the offering. Bring a sin...
Some gifts to God are creatures of the night. The limbs and the fat-pieces of a burnt offering could be laid on the fire as the sun went down and left to smolder until dawn. That m...
A verse seems to permit libations even at night, and the question rolls outward from there. Libations that accompany an animal sacrifice are tied to the daytime, the sages teach, b...
Rabbi Akiva lays down a rule with a clean edge. If an offering became disqualified only after it had entered the sacred precinct, the precinct holds onto it and it does not come do...
How many fires burned on the great altar at once? The teachers disagree, and the disagreement is a kind of devotion, each one counting the flames with care. Rabbi Yehuda says two o...
Abaye took it upon himself to set in order the entire morning rhythm of the Temple, drawing on received tradition and the teaching of Abba Shaul. The result reads like a choreograp...
Before a priest lifted the ashes from the altar, he dressed for the task, and the Torah's spare phrase about his linen garment becomes a quarry of meaning. The single word "bad" is...
A garment that has served the higher holiness may be used afterward for a lesser one, and the sages find this principle folded into the verse about the priest putting on his linen....
Before dawn, while the city still slept, a priest climbed the ramp of the great altar in plain linen. His task was not glamorous. He was to gather yesterday's ashes, the spent rema...
Once the fire on the altar had done its work, a small mound of ash settled at the summit, the famous tapuach, the apple-shaped heap. A sharp question follows. Is that ash still sac...
The Torah says the priest takes off and puts on garments when carrying the ashes outside the camp. Does this mean what the High Priest does on Yom Kippur, stripping off the holy ve...
Here is a puzzle in the logic of sacred law. As a rule, once a commanded object has done its job, you can no longer commit the sin of misusing holy property with it. The ash that t...
The Torah does not merely permit the priest to change his garments for the dirty work of the ashes. It commands it, and from that command the sages drew a rule of common decency: t...
