2,211 passages in Rabbinic Midrash
Individual passages from Yalkut Shimoni on Torah, shown in source order. Page 7 of 47.
Rabbi Elazar reads the promise to Abraham at full reach. "All the families of the earth shall be blessed in you" does not mean only the people of the covenant. Even the most distan...
Rav delivers a sharp warning in the name of his teacher. Three things, he says, cut a person's life short, and each one is a refusal of something offered freely. The first is being...
The verse seems plain: Abram set out as God had told him, with Lot tagging along, and he was seventy-five years old when he left Haran. The sages note that Lot came as a secondary ...
The sages worked like careful detectives, fitting the scattered dates of Abraham's life into a single timeline. The clue is the figure of four hundred and thirty years that the Tor...
Look closely at the words of the verse and you stumble into wonder. The Torah says Abram took his wife, his possessions, and "the souls they had made in Haran." Made souls? Gather ...
One verse, three sages, and a single radical idea: when you bring someone toward Torah, you are credited as if you had brought that person into being. Resh Lakish anchors it in the...
The sages keep a careful ledger of sacred time, and here they pause over Abraham's age. By the tradition handed down, when he left Haran with Sarah and the souls they had gathered,...
Abraham walks the land and reads it the way one reads a deed. He reaches Shechem, and the sages note that even then the land's merit was still being weighed for his children. Then ...
The verse says Abraham "called on the name of the LORD," and the sages offer a second reading alongside prayer. To call on God's name, here, is to call out to others on God's behal...
Hardly has Abraham entered the land than the ground betrays him: a famine strikes, and he must go down to Egypt to survive. The sages read this through a string of verses about the...
The rabbis draw a piece of practical wisdom straight out of Abraham's story. When famine grips the city, do not sit still and starve. Spread your feet and go. They prove it from Ab...
The verse catches the ear of the sages with a single awkward word. As they near Egypt, Abraham turns to Sarah and says, "Behold now, I know that you are a beautiful woman." Now he ...
The midrash gathers two giants who chose to stand in another's shadow. Barak, summoned by Deborah to fight Sisera, refused to march unless she came with him. The rabbis read his he...
Abraham did not enter Egypt unguarded. Knowing what the Egyptians did to beautiful women, he hid Sarah inside a sealed chest and brought her to the border like ordinary freight. At...
When Pharaoh's courtiers caught sight of Sarah, they did not merely admire her. They bargained over her. One officer offered a hundred dinars for the privilege of going in to her; ...
The capture of Sarah is counted as one link in a chain of ten ordeals that tested Abraham across his whole life. The midrash walks through the early ones. At his birth, kings and a...
From the single verse that Abram prospered on Sarah's account, the sages draw a law of the household. A man must guard against wronging his wife, because her tears come easily, and...
The verse that Pharaoh was plagued for seizing Sarah opens a wider teaching on why the affliction of leprosy comes upon a person at all. Rabbi Jonathan, transmitted by Rabbi Samuel...
When Pharaoh sent Abraham out of Egypt, he assigned men to accompany him a short distance, a courtesy of escort measured at four cubits. It looks like a small kindness, a few paces...
God tells Abraham to go down to Egypt and conquer the road ahead, because whatever happens to the father will happen to the children. The midrash lays Abraham's life beside Israel'...
The Sages noticed something small in the verse and turned it into a rule for living. When Abraham came back up from Egypt, Scripture says he returned "to the place where his tent h...
Many people only learn the hard way to pray before disaster strikes, crying out to God only once the crisis is already on top of them. Rabbi Eleazar reads the life of Abraham and f...
Lot owed Abraham everything. The Sages count four distinct kindnesses that flowed to him simply because he traveled at his uncle's side: prosperity on the road, rescue from the fou...
The choice Lot made was not only about real estate. When Scripture says he "journeyed from the east," the Sages catch a second meaning in the Hebrew word for east, kedem, which als...
Sodom's reputation was not built on ordinary greed. The Sages remember a society that engineered cruelty into law, and the catalog is staggering. They reasoned that since their lan...
A teacher named Rav Hamnuna turned to a colleague who was reciting aggadah and pressed him with a scholar's question. The book of Proverbs declares that "the memory of the righteou...
Notice the timing. The verse pointedly says God spoke to Abraham "after Lot had separated from him" (Genesis 13:14). The Sages read that delay as meaningful. So long as Lot, the sc...
"Arise, walk through the land in its length and in its breadth" (Genesis 13:17). The Sages debated whether those words were a legal lesson about acquiring property by walking it, a...
The sages drew a sharp contrast between the two patriarchs by looking at what Scripture says, and at what it pointedly does not say. Of Abraham, the verse never records that he kep...
The midrash opens the war of the kings with a verse from Psalms about the wicked who draw the sword only to have it pierce their own heart. To unfold it, the sages tell the story o...
The sages return to the four kings of Genesis and read them a second way, as a coded map of the empires that would later rule over Israel. Amrafel king of Shinar stands for Babylon...
Who was this king Amrafel who opens the war of Genesis 14? The sages identify him with Nimrod, the mighty hunter and first tyrant, and Rav and Shmuel debate which name was the orig...
When the Torah lists the five kings of the plain who went to war, Rabbi Meir, famous for reading meaning out of names, treats each name as a verdict on its bearer. Bera, king of So...
The midrash works verse by verse through the war of the kings. The Valley of Siddim carried three names, each read for meaning: a place that grew stumps, a valley that nursed its p...
The Talmudic tradition pauses on a puzzle from the wars of Moses. Sihon and Og, the two Amorite kings Israel faced east of the Jordan, were brothers, both said to be sons of Achiah...
Why does the Torah suddenly call Abraham "the Hebrew," ha-Ivri, when the fugitive brings news of Lot's capture? The sages offer three readings of the word. Rabbi Yehudah says it me...
Word reached Abraham that Lot had been carried off in the war of the kings, and he did not flinch. Scripture had already taken his measure: a man who fears no evil report, whose he...
Who, exactly, came to Abraham's aid in the night battle? Rabbi Yochanan answered with a name: the angel that met him was called Night, and he found support for it in the Book of Jo...
How did one man and a household rout four victorious kings? The sages painted the battle in miracle. One said Abraham threw fistfuls of dust that turned to swords in midair, and to...
When Abraham returned from war, a mysterious figure came out to meet him: Melchizedek, king of Shalem, bearing bread and wine. The sages mined his name and his city for meaning. Re...
Melchizedek is called "priest to God Most High," yet the tradition reads his priesthood as a thing he lost in the very moment of this meeting. Rabbi Abba bar Kahana noted that wher...
When Melchizedek blessed Abraham, he called God "possessor of heaven and earth," and the sages seized on that word, possessor or acquirer, to build a short list of what the Holy On...
An earlier teaching counted three things the Holy One claims as His own possessions: the Torah, the heavens and earth, and the people of Israel. Here a second opinion expands the l...
The blessing calls God "possessor of heaven and earth," and the sages ask what it means to possess them. It is like praising a person by naming what is lovely in him. Abraham earne...
Solomon tells the child to listen to a father's instruction and never abandon a mother's teaching, and the rabbis hear in that verse a family inheritance of generosity. Long before...
One gesture, three meanings. When Abraham raised his hand to the LORD after the war of the kings, the sages refused to flatten the moment into a single act. Rabbi Judah heard an of...
Abraham swore to the king of Sodom that he would not take so much as a thread or a shoelace from him, so that no one could ever say he had made Abraham rich. God answered that refu...
The same vow that gave Israel the fringe and the levirate rite is read again, and now the thread and the shoelace point toward the sanctuary itself. The thread becomes the woven Ta...
