2,211 passages in Rabbinic Midrash
Individual passages from Yalkut Shimoni on Torah, shown in source order. Page 6 of 47.
The waters were sinking, but Noah could not see it from inside the ark. He sent the dove out into a drowned world. She found nowhere to land and came home, because a creature with ...
The door of the ark could have been forced. Rabbi Yudan even admitted he would have broken it open and walked free. But Noah refused. "Just as I came in only by permission," he rea...
When the waters were gone, Noah did the arithmetic. God had told him to take seven of each clean animal but only a pair of each unclean one. The extra clean beasts had to be for so...
God smelled the pleasing aroma of Noah's offering, and the Sages turn the verse toward wine and the human heart. A man who stays gentle when he drinks, said Rav Hanina, carries som...
When God smelled the pleasing aroma of Noah's altar, the Sages say He was not only smelling roasted offerings. He was breathing in something that would rise from human beings in ag...
Watch how the verse phrases it after the flood: "the LORD said in His heart." The Sages noticed who else speaks that way. The fool, Esau, Jeroboam, Haman - each one "said in his he...
"While the earth remains - seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night shall not cease." After the flood, the children of Noah might have read this as an ...
The Sages return to the promise of "while the earth remains" and read it again as a covenant with a limit. It holds only as long as day and night keep turning. When the prophet's s...
After the flood, the dread of humanity was restored over the beasts, but full dominion was not. It returned only once, in the days of Solomon, whose rule reached across the whole r...
The Sages stretched the verse "your blood of your lives will I require" to reach the one who takes his own life, weighing whether even Saul, who fell on his sword, or Hananiah, Mis...
While studying Torah in a valley near Tiberias, Reish Lakish overheard two women leaving the area. One blessed God for bringing them out of such foul air. Curious, he asked where t...
Why did the rainbow become the sign of the covenant, and why do some generations never need it? The Sages taught that the rainbow appears as a warning, a sign that a generation's m...
The Torah counts the descendants of Noah, and the bookkeeping does not quite add up. Tally the lines of Japheth, Ham, and Shem and you reach seventy-four families. Yet the verse in...
Noah survived the flood as "a righteous man," and the very next thing the Torah tells us is that he planted a vineyard and got drunk. The sages read his demotion right into the wor...
The Torah does not say Noah uncovered himself; it says he "was uncovered," passively, and the sages hear in that grammar a verdict. His drinking caused exile, first to himself and ...
Noah sobers up and learns what was done to him while he slept, and his curse falls not on Ham, who committed the act, but on Ham's son Canaan. The puzzle is obvious. Why should the...
A single short comment closes one corner of the debate over why Canaan, and not his father Ham, bore the curse. Rabbi Nechemiah cuts through the difficulty with a simple claim abou...
This reading reaches back into the long year aboard the ark to find a hidden grievance. Noah was an old man tending a floating world of animals, and the sages picture him exhausted...
Noah's blessing on Japheth, "may God enlarge Japheth, and may He dwell in the tents of Shem," becomes a meditation on what the nations can and cannot bring to Israel. The sages fir...
The Table of Nations in Genesis becomes, in the rabbinic reading, a map of the peoples the sages knew in their own world. The sons of Japheth are matched to Africa, Germania, Media...
The Torah marks a single word, hu ("he is"), with hidden weight. Five times it crowns the righteous: Abram who became Abraham, Moses and Aaron, faithful King Hezekiah, Ezra who cam...
A single place-name can carry a whole verdict. When Scripture calls the land Babel, Rabbi Yochanan hears in the name the word for mixture. This was the place mingled with Scripture...
One reading of Shinar turns dark: it bred a foe against Heaven, and that foe was Nebuchadnezzar. But against him the sages set a contrasting figure, Asshur. When Scripture says Ass...
The table of nations is more than a list to the sages; it is a gallery of character. Egypt's lineage they treat as suspect coinage, false from the mint. Among the Pathrusim and Cas...
Before there was a world, there was the Torah, and God did not set it down lightly. The sages picture the Holy One sitting for nine hundred seventy-four generations before creation...
What madness drove the builders? The sages let us hear their own speech. They told one another that every sixteen hundred fifty-six years the sky itself begins to totter, so the se...
If the dispersion generation openly defied God, why did they fare better than the flood generation? The sages answer with a parable. A man opens one barrel of wine and finds vinega...
At the heart of the rebellion was a single renunciation. The sages say the builders removed themselves from the Ancient One of the world, declaring outright: we want neither Him no...
The Torah says that the Holy One, blessed be He, came down to look at the city and the tower that the children of man had built. But why would He need to come down to see what He a...
The builders had been given a chance to turn back, and they squandered it. The midrash reads their stubbornness through a verse in Jeremiah about a grape-gatherer passing his hand ...
Rabbi Shimon pictures the moment of judgment as a heavenly council. The Holy One, blessed be He, summoned the seventy angels who stand around the throne of glory and said to them, ...
The sages read a double sentence in the verses about Babel. Scripture says twice that God scattered the builders: "and the LORD scattered them from there" and again "and from there...
What were the builders actually after? The school of Rabbi Shila offered a wild answer: they meant to climb to the dome of the sky and crack it open with axes, to let the waters ab...
Terah sold idols, and one day he left young Abraham to mind the shop. It became a comedy of conscience. A man of sixty came to buy a god, and Abraham asked his age, then marveled: ...
The Torah lists the wives of Abram and Nahor and slips in an unfamiliar name, Iscah, daughter of Haran. Rabbi Yitzchak makes a quiet but consequential identification: Iscah is none...
The sages offer a second reason for the name Iscah. Beyond her prophetic gaze, she was so beautiful that everyone gazed upon her. The same root that named her a seer also named her...
The Torah reports that Sarai was barren, but the sages noticed an unusual phrase. It does not merely say she had no child; it says, in the rabbis' reading, that she had no place fo...
Rabbi Levi found a hidden pattern running through Scripture. Whenever the text declares that a woman or a city "has none" no child, no one to seek her out it is not a verdict but a...
When the Flood had done its terrible work and the world was emptied of the wicked, one righteous man remained. The midrash pictures the moment with tenderness: the Holy One, blesse...
How did one man, surrounded by idol-worshippers, come to know the living God? Rabbi Yitzchak gives the famous parable. A traveler is passing through the countryside when he sees a ...
The sages never let a word of the call to Abraham lie idle. The Hebrew command lekh lekha, "go forth," is built from letters that can also be read as numbers, and when you add them...
Abraham's life as the sages read it was framed by two great tests, and God bound them together with a single phrase. The first words of his calling were lekh lecha, go forth from y...
Rabbi Yitzchak teaches that a harsh decree against a person is not the last word. Four things, he says, can tear it up. The first is charity, for Scripture promises that charity de...
The sages offer a parable to capture the leap God asked of Abraham. A king enters a province and notices a handsome young man covered in soot, feeding wood into the furnace that he...
A code is stitched into the Hebrew alphabet itself. Five letters wear a second form when they fall at the end of a word, and Rabbi Eliezer teaches that each of those doubled letter...
God promises Abraham, "I will make you a great nation," and the sages hear in the word "make" something startling. Not "give" or "set," but make, as in remake. Abraham becomes a ne...
Resh Lakish takes the threefold promise to Abraham and maps it directly onto the opening words of Jewish prayer. "I will make you a great nation" becomes the God of Abraham. "I wil...
God tells Abraham, "I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse, I Myself." The sages notice that small extra word. When God speaks of His own honor, ...
