2,211 passages in Rabbinic Midrash
Individual passages from Yalkut Shimoni on Torah, shown in source order. Page 5 of 47.
Rav taught a curious detail about the first man: Adam spoke Aramaic. He found the proof in a phrase from Psalms whose wording carries an Aramaic flavor, "How precious to me are You...
There's a fascinating passage in the Yalkut Shimoni on Torah, specifically section 41, that gives us a glimpse – a truly mind-bending glimpse – into just such a conversation. It in...
The verse "This is the book of the generations of Adam" carries, for one stream of teaching, a hidden science: the secret of the calendar. The Holy One first calculated the leap ye...
"Male and female He created them" became, for Rabbi Elazar, a definition of what it means to be human. A man without a wife, he said, is not fully a man, for the original creation ...
"And Enoch walked with God, and he was no more, for God took him" (Genesis 5:24). The verse is so brief that it bred debate. Some sages refused to place Enoch among the simply righ...
When Lamech named his son, the Torah seems to mismatch the name and its meaning: "He called his name Noah, saying, this one shall comfort us" (Genesis 5:29). Noah means rest, yet L...
How did Lamech know, at the moment of his son's birth, that this child would comfort the world? Was he a prophet? Rabbi Shimon ben Yehotzadak traced the knowledge back to a traditi...
The phrase "the ground which the LORD has cursed" opened a sweeping survey of hunger across history. The sages counted ten famines. The first struck in Adam's day, when the soil it...
Why did Noah wait five centuries before becoming a father, when the men of his time had children at one or two hundred? The sages saw mercy hidden in the delay. The Holy One, bless...
When the verse says humanity "began to multiply," two great sages heard opposite things in the same Hebrew word. Rabbi Yochanan heard increase, the joy of a world filling with life...
Who were the "sons of God" who took whatever women they desired? The sages refused the literal sense and read instead "the sons of judges," the powerful men of the age. A bitter pr...
This famous and unsettling legend opens with Lot pleading through the night for the men of Sodom, his prayers accepted until the mob demanded his guests for assault, at which point...
The verse "My spirit shall not abide in man forever" reads, on its surface, as a limit set on the human lifespan. The sages heard something sharper in it. They took the words as a ...
This brief comment offers yet another way to hear the verse "My spirit shall not abide in man." Where one reading made it a refusal to revive the wicked, this one turns on the timi...
This rich anthology of comments turns the single verse "My spirit shall not abide in man" into a meditation on judgment, resurrection, and the worth of the Flood generation. Severa...
One last reading wrings a final meaning from the words "it shall not abide." The phrase is taken to declare that the souls of the Flood generation will never be allowed back into t...
The rabbis counted six people whose names were spoken before their mothers ever held them. Each name was a sealed prophecy waiting to open. Ishmael means God will hear, and the sag...
The sages played a game of hidden names, insisting that everyone who matters in Israel's story is already tucked somewhere in the Five Books, waiting to be found. Where is Moses hi...
Scripture says the Nephilim were on the earth, and the sages gave these giants seven names, each one a verdict disguised as a label. They were called Emim because terror fell on an...
When Scripture says God was grieved to His heart over making man, a gentile pressed Rabbi Yehoshua ben Korchah: if God foresees everything, why grieve? The rabbi answered with a fa...
The sages turned over the small phrase that Noah found grace, weighing it against the verse from Job about delivering the innocent. They drew a careful distinction. The Holy One, b...
The rabbis kept circling the single word grace, showing how it binds one person to another until trust, authority, even a daughter in marriage passes between them, and they linked ...
The rabbis listened closely to the word "these" at the head of Noah's story. When Scripture opens with "these," they taught, it shuts a door on what came before. So when the verse ...
When the Torah opens the portion of Noah by repeating his name, Noah Noah, the sages refused to treat it as accident. A doubled name, they taught, marks a person who holds a portio...
Rabbi Samuel counted five men who watched their lives collapse and then watched a brand new world rise from the rubble. Noah survived a flood so violent it ground millstones to pow...
Why does Scripture say Noah walked "with" God, while Abraham walked "before" Him? Rabbi Judah hears a quiet criticism of Noah. A king tells his little child, "Hold my hand," but te...
The sages gathered their starkest warnings about the misuse of one's own body. Rabbi Elazar opens with the flood generation, whose corruption, the verse says, was "all flesh." From...
The verse announces that "the end of all flesh" had come before God, and the midrash hammers the phrase with a string of grim synonyms. Their time had arrived to be cut down, to be...
Reading the single word "violence" in the verse about the flood, the sages refuse to let it mean just one thing. They unfold it into four. Drawing on verses scattered across the pr...
When God commands Noah, "Make yourself an ark," the sages notice that this exact phrase, "make yourself," appears four times in the Torah and beyond. Three times Scripture spells o...
God tells Noah to seal the ark with pitch both inside and out, and the sages compare this to the basket that carried the infant Moses on the Nile. There the verse used two coatings...
How did Noah see inside a sealed ark riding out a year of storm and darkness? The verse says God told him to make a tzohar, a word that can mean window or noon-brightness, and Rabb...
How do you build a boat that has to survive a year afloat with no captain to steer it? The sages read the verses of the ark's blueprint as a course in engineering and good sense at...
The verse says Noah took aboard "every living thing," and the sages pressed on that word "living." Some read it to include even the spirits, those beings created with souls but nev...
The verse says the animals came "male and female." From this the sages drew a rule for which creatures Noah should welcome aboard: if a male pursued a female, accept the pair, but ...
Before Noah could even step into the ark, the verses say the Holy One, blessed be He, would establish a covenant with him. Why a covenant just to walk through a door? The sages ans...
Why forty days of rain, and not some other span? Rabbi Shimon bar Yohai connected it to the Torah, given over forty days, which that generation had trampled. Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakk...
The verse marks a strange seven-day pause before the rains began, and one tradition fills that week with a sign no one could miss. During those days, the Holy One, blessed be He, r...
The generation of the flood had already been given a long stretch of time to change their ways. The verse's mention of a final seven days, the sages taught, reveals something about...
The seven days before the flood held one more mystery. According to this reading, the Holy One, blessed be He, used that final week to give the doomed generation a foretaste of the...
The verse says the waters came only after seven days had passed, and the sages refused to read those seven days as a mere calendar note. Something tender was hidden in that delay. ...
Before a single drop fell, the sages picture the Holy One, blessed be He, in mourning. The verse says God was grieved at His heart, and grief, the rabbis insist, is the language of...
The sages read the flood like a ledger, both in its justice and in its calendar. The opening principle is measure for measure. The generation sinned with the eye, which resembles w...
The verse says the LORD shut Noah in, and the sages fill that bare phrase with wonder and terror. The sun and moon went dark for the whole twelve months, the world unlit. So how di...
Rabbi Yonatan was on his way up to pray in Jerusalem when a Samaritan needled him: why trudge to that ruin when this blessed mountain, Gerizim, stands right here, the one mountain ...
When the verse says God remembered Noah, the sages refuse to let "remembered" pass as a passive note. They read it through a psalm: Your righteousness is like the mighty mountains,...
The sages diagnose the flood generation's ruin not as poverty but as comfort. The Holy One, blessed be He, lavished good upon them, and that very abundance turned to arrogance. The...
When Noah opened the window of the ark and sent out the raven, the bird refused to go quietly. It flew to and fro, scolding Noah: of all the creatures aboard, why send me? Noah ans...
