2,211 passages in Rabbinic Midrash
Individual passages from Yalkut Shimoni on Torah, shown in source order. Page 8 of 47.
Rava draws the same lesson from Abraham's vow but lands on a different pair of gifts: the thread of blue and the leather strap of the tefillin. The strap is easy to understand. Scr...
God takes the two words of Abraham's oath and turns each into a promise about his descendants, one of tenderness and one of judgment. Because Abraham said "a thread," God says he w...
Even Abraham, who refused every thread of Sodom's wealth, made one exception: the food his young men had already eaten on the march. Rava draws a sharp lesson from this. Stolen goo...
The opening of Genesis 15 is counted as Abraham's seventh trial, and the sages note that God did not speak to him the way He spoke to other prophets. The rest of the prophets recei...
On the night that would one day become Passover, the Holy One led Abraham outside beneath the stars and let him see the whole future folded into a strange sacrifice. The heifer, th...
After Abraham came home from defeating the four kings, victory left him uneasy rather than proud. What if among all those soldiers he had cut down there was one good man, one God-f...
Death is the door almost everyone passes through to reach the next world, but a small handful of people, the tradition says, walked into the Garden of Eden alive and never tasted i...
Abraham looked at the night sky and read despair in it. The stars told him plainly: you, Abram, will never father a child. Astrology had spoken, and his own reading of the heavens ...
Rav, quoting a single verse, finds in it the principle that Israel is not governed by the stars. When God brought Abraham outside, Abraham first protested from inside the worldview...
The whole long meditation begins from one small slip. When Abraham asked God "by what shall I know" that he would inherit the land, that single hesitant question was treated as a l...
When Nimrod hurled Abraham into the blazing furnace at Ur, the angel Gabriel stepped forward, eager to act. Master of the Universe, he asked, let me go down and rescue the righteou...
The scene at Ur is brutal in its detail. Abraham was bound and laid on the ground, hemmed in by walls of firewood five cubits long and five cubits high on every side, ready to be c...
The sages preserved a memory that our father Abraham did not stroll easily toward his calling. Rav taught that he spent ten years in prison before God ever spoke the famous command...
Terah read the stars and saw two destinies in his sons. One horoscope showed Haran burning. The other showed Abraham becoming the source from whom the world would be filled. The sa...
The sages gathered seven moments when the rules of the world bent in a way they had never bent before. Each one anchors itself to a verse, and together they trace a single thread o...
When Abraham asked, "By what shall I know that I will inherit the land?" (Genesis 15:8), the sages refused to hear it as doubt. Rabbi Chama bar Chanina insisted Abraham was not com...
The sages read the same covenant scene a second time, and now the animals turn into empire. The threefold heifer becomes Babylon with its three kings, Nebuchadnezzar, Evil-merodach...
Rabbi Yochanan, teaching in the name of Rabbi Shimon ben Yochai, made a startling claim about the history of prayer. From the day the world was created, through all the generations...
Rabbi Yose opened with a claim that sounds almost cosmic: without the daily watch-stations of the Temple service, heaven and earth themselves could not stand. The whole created ord...
As the sun set on Abraham, a deep sleep fell over him, and the sages turned that single word, tardemah, into a meditation on every kind of sleep. Rabbi Levi warned that drifting of...
God's promise to Abraham at the Covenant Between the Pieces carries hidden arithmetic. When the Holy One said He would judge the nation that would enslave Abraham's children, the v...
God promised Abraham that his children would be strangers in a land not theirs for four hundred years. Yet the sages knew that Israel's actual stay in Egypt was much shorter, and t...
The sages read the four hundred years of exile as a chain of lifetimes, and along the way they uncovered a surprising guest in the story. Tracing the years from the promise to Abra...
God's promise to Abraham included a strange clause: the descendants would leave their exile "with great substance." The plunder taken at the Exodus partly answered it, but the midr...
The verse promising Abraham that he would go to his fathers "in peace" became, for the sages, a lesson in how we say goodbye. Hebrew has two ways to wish someone peace at parting, ...
When God told Abraham he would go to his fathers in peace, the sages heard several promises folded into one line. "To your fathers" was a quiet assurance that Abraham's own father,...
At the Covenant Between the Pieces, as darkness fell and a smoking furnace with a flaming torch passed between the severed animals, Abraham was shown the long future of his childre...
"On that day the LORD made a covenant with Abram." The phrase about cutting a covenant becomes the thread the sages follow through all of Scripture, naming seven fathers with whom ...
When God told Abraham, "To your offspring I have given this land," the rabbis noticed the verb. Not "I will give," but "I have given." To Rav Shmuel bar Nachmani this was the secre...
A traveler once asked an old sage a painful question: why does God hold back children from the very households of Israel that long for them most? The answer turned the grief inside...
Sarah understood her own affliction with a clear and unflinching eye. She did not reach for charms or accuse some hidden curse. She named it plainly: the LORD Himself had held her ...
The rabbis drew a firm law from a single phrase in Abraham's story. If a couple lives together ten years and no child is born, the husband may not simply wait on indefinitely; the ...
Hagar conceived from the very first union with Abraham, and the swiftness of it became its own lesson. Rabbi Chanina ben Pazi compared it to weeds and wheat. Thorns spring up unten...
Rabbi Chanan drew a stark warning out of Sarah's complaint. When she cried to Abraham, "My wrong be upon you," she invoked judgment against her own husband, and the rabbis noticed ...
A short, severe teaching names three situations in which Heaven reopens the ledger of a person's sins. The first is standing beneath a leaning wall, a structure already tilting tow...
The quarrel between the women turned harsh and physical. The sages disagreed on exactly how Sarah afflicted Hagar: one said she withheld the rights of the marriage bed, another tha...
When the angel found Hagar at the spring in the wilderness, the rabbis counted carefully how many heavenly messengers had come to her. Some said five, some said four, but all agree...
At the spring of water in the wilderness, Hagar did something remarkable. She gave a name to the One who had spoken to her, calling Him the God of seeing. The rabbis wrestled with ...
When Abraham was ninety-nine years old, the Holy One came to him with the eighth and final trial of his life. The command was blunt. Until now you were not complete before Me. Remo...
The prophet Hosea compared the patriarchs to the first ripe fruit on a fig tree, and the rabbis built a meditation on the timing of Abraham's circumcision around that image. A fig ...
The name El Shaddai, the rabbis taught, holds a secret in its sound. Shaddai breaks into the words 'who said enough.' This is the God who told the heavens and the earth, Enough, ha...
The Torah speaks of the fruit of a young tree as forbidden, calling it by the same word used for the foreskin of the body. The rabbis identified that tree as the grapevine, and the...
How great is circumcision? The rabbis piled praise upon praise. Of all the commandments Abraham kept, he was never called whole until he was circumcised. Rav taught that when the H...
The rabbis closed their meditation on the covenant of the flesh with the boldest claim of all. Great is circumcision, they said, for it is weighed as the equal of the entire Torah....
A parable. A king had a friend he loved, a rough provincial man, and he wanted to raise him up and make him a duke. But he could not, because there was a blemish on the man that di...
Another parable, gentler than the first. A noblewoman came before the king to pay her respects and inquire after his welfare. The king looked at her and said, half to himself, "How...
The sages ask a precise question: where does the Torah itself authorize notarikon, the art of cracking a single word open as if every letter were the head of a hidden phrase? Their...
Rami bar Hama reads a hidden arithmetic in Abraham's renaming. The human body, the sages held, has two hundred and forty-eight limbs. Yet a person does not truly command all of the...
