2,211 passages in Rabbinic Midrash
Individual passages from Yalkut Shimoni on Torah, shown in source order. Page 9 of 47.
God's covenant with Abraham promises to be "a God to you and to your seed after you" (Genesis 17:7). The sages of this passage press on three small words: and to your seed after yo...
The Talmudic sages return to the same covenant verse and ask a blunt question: when God promised to be a God "to you and to your seed after you," what exactly was the Merciful One ...
A legal debate opens out of the covenant's command to "keep My covenant" (Genesis 17:9). The question is sharp: if a gentile performs a circumcision, is it valid? The sages agree i...
A general rule governs the commandments: anything first given to the sons of Noah and then repeated at Sinai binds everyone, Israel and the nations alike. So the sages test circumc...
Do not treat a small mitzvah as a small thing. The sages take the Omer, the simple measure of barley waved before the Holy One, blessed be He, at the start of the harvest, and trac...
The sages count carefully. Twice the verse says Abram fell upon his face when God spoke to him about the covenant of circumcision. To the rabbinic ear, nothing in Scripture is wast...
A change of name in the Torah raises a sharp legal question, and Bar Kappara presses it. When God renamed Abram as Abraham, was the old name retired for good? If so, the same rule ...
How seriously does the Torah take a name? For Bar Kappara, very. To call the patriarch "Abram" after God renamed him is to transgress a positive commandment. Rabbi Levi pushes furt...
Rav Yudan reads the promise of the land as a single chain with five links, each pulling the next. Accepting God's sovereignty depends on entering the land; entering the land depend...
The verse names two kinds of slave who must be circumcised, the one "born in your house" and the one "bought with your money" (Genesis 17:13). The sages refuse to let those categor...
The Torah does not merely say "circumcise"; it doubles the verb, "he shall surely be circumcised" (Genesis 17:13). The sages never let a doubled word pass without meaning. Here it ...
May anyone perform a circumcision? Rabbi Judah says a Samaritan may not circumcise an Israelite, because he does the act "for the sake of Mount Gerizim," binding the covenant to hi...
A single doubled verb in Genesis, "He shall surely be circumcised," becomes a doorway into the whole structure of the rite. The sages read the repetition as covering both the cut a...
When the verse forbids Abraham to call his wife Sarai any longer, the sages hear a coronation. The single Hebrew letter yod that is lifted from her name does not vanish. In one tel...
Among the rabbinic catalog of dreams and their meanings sits this small and pointed teaching. To dream of Ishmael is a good omen, a sign that your prayer has been heard, and the pr...
The covenant is fixed firmly on Isaac, and the sages note in passing that the year of the promise was a leap year, full enough to make room for what was coming. Then the focus turn...
This brief teaching answers a quiet question left hanging by the Torah's account. Abraham circumcised not only himself and Ishmael but every male in his large household, including ...
After the pain of circumcision, Abraham worries over a loss that has nothing to do with his body. He was famous for his open tent and his welcome of travelers, and now the road see...
The opening of Vayera is read as the third day after Abraham's circumcision, the day a wound burns hottest, and the sages fill it with tenderness. God comes to visit the sick. To s...
Abraham's hurried hospitality to three travelers becomes, in the eyes of the sages, a contract that God repays across all of history. Each small courtesy at the tent is matched, po...
When three travelers approached his tent in the heat of the day, Abraham offered them a simple morsel of bread, yet he understood something the sages would later draw out of his wo...
A son hires day laborers and promises them a meal. His father, Rabbi Yohanan ben Matya, stops him: even a feast worthy of King Solomon would not discharge the debt, because these w...
The promise carried a hidden calendar. When the visitor told Abraham that Sarah would bear a son "at the living season," the sages read the phrase as a date and ran the months forw...
Caught between fear and wonder, Sarah denied that she had laughed, and the visitor answered plainly, "No, but you did laugh." From her denial the sages drew a rule about testimony,...
Rabbi Elazar noticed a pattern in how the Torah arranges its verses. When Scripture praises Abraham, "For I have known him, that he may command his children," the very next breath ...
Why should God tell Abraham what He intends to do to Sodom? The midrash answers by climbing a ladder of intimacy. A divine secret first belongs to those who fear God, then to the u...
Rabbi Shimon ben Halafta tells the story as a royal marriage. A king weds a noblewoman who brings two tenant-farmers into the household as her share, and the king matches her by se...
The outcry of Sodom is described as something that did not merely exist but kept swelling. Rabbi Hanina reads the word as a cry that grew and went on growing, a wickedness that fed...
Sodom did not merely neglect the poor. It made mercy a capital crime. The city's edict was blunt: hand a crust of bread to anyone who is hungry, and you will be put to the fire. Cr...
Sodom's prosperity looks, from the outside, like a long stretch of good fortune. The rabbis count it differently. Of its fifty-two years of ease, twenty-two were not peace at all. ...
Abraham presses a lawyer's case against Heaven, and the boldness is breathtaking. You swore, he argues, never again to flood the world. So is a flood of fire a loophole? If You dro...
Abraham's protest sounds airtight: it would be unthinkable for the Judge of all the earth to destroy the righteous together with the wicked. But Rabbi Abba bar Kahana raises an unc...
A cynical complaint never quite dies out: what do the scholars actually do for the rest of us? They study for their own benefit, they read and recite for their own reward, and the ...
One might imagine that arguing with God is dangerous insolence. The midrash insists on the opposite. When the righteous press their case to Heaven, God does not resent it; He invit...
Standing before God to argue Sodom's case, Abraham measures himself honestly. He is presuming to negotiate with the Master of the world, and he names what he is in comparison: I am...
Abraham looks back over his life and reads new meaning into his own words. "Dust and ashes" was no idle phrase. Had Amraphel struck him down in the war of the kings, he would have ...
When Abraham stood before the Holy One, blessed be He, and pleaded for the cities of the plain, he did not lower his request below ten righteous people. The sages ask the obvious q...
Why did Abraham settle on the number ten when he pleaded for Sodom? One tradition says he was doing a quiet head count. Lot lived in those cities, and Lot had a household: himself,...
The midrash reads the close of Abraham's plea like a scene in a courtroom. Three figures fill the chamber: the Judge, the defense advocate, and the prosecutor. The Holy One, blesse...
Scripture says the messengers reached Sodom "at evening," though they had left Abraham's tent at noon. Why the long delay over so short a road? Because these were angels of mercy w...
Lot greets the two visitors at Sodom's gate and begs them to lodge with him. The sages catch a wary note in his welcome. He asks them to bend their route and slip in quietly, so th...
When Lot shields his guests from the mob, he lets slip a quiet admission. He understood that the two strangers under his roof were no ordinary travelers but messengers from heaven....
The mob pressed against Lot's door, and the angels acted. They pulled Lot inside and tilted the house to crush the crowd, telling him that whatever guests he wished to save he must...
This brief passage turns a moment of escape into a unit of measurement. The rabbis want to know how far a person travels in the stretch of time between first light and full sunrise...
The angel's command to Lot carries a hidden word. He tells him to take his wife and his two daughters "who are found here," and the sages catch the verb. To be "found" is to be a t...
When the angels tell Lot to flee, he hesitates, and the text says he "lingered." The sages read this as bewilderment piled on bewilderment, and they put words in his mouth. What sh...
Throughout the Lot story, the word "lord" is read as ordinary address to the angels, with one exception. When Lot says "your servant has found favor in your eyes," the sages insist...
When the verse says the Lord rained destruction on Sodom, the rabbis reach for an image from the Psalms to describe how the city went down. Sodom dissolved like a snail that melts ...
