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Miriam Daughter of Nakdimon Picks Barley From Horse Dung

The daughter of Jerusalem's greatest philanthropist, once allotted five hundred gold dinars a day, forages for barley in the streets.

Curated by Arthur · Told by Maggid ·
Table of Contents
  1. Five Hundred Gold Dinars for a Basket of Perfume
  2. The Man Who Made It Rain
  3. The Sages and the Insult She Would Not Accept
  4. What She Did When Rome Came
  5. The Distance Between Perfume and Barley

Five Hundred Gold Dinars for a Basket of Perfume

The Sages administering the estate of the dead were known to be generous. When they assessed what Miriam daughter of Nakdimon was entitled to from her marriage settlement, they made their calculation and arrived at a number that would have supported a normal family for years: five hundred gold dinars per day. Not per year. Per day. And that was specifically for her basket of perfume.

She told them it was an insult. She said they should be ashamed of giving her so little.

Her complaint was not entirely without foundation. Her father, Nakdimon ben Gorion, had been one of the three wealthiest men in all of Jerusalem, a man so blessed by Heaven that the sun was said to have stayed in the sky past its time to prevent him from forfeiting a financial pledge over a matter of unpaid wells. His family's philanthropy was legendary. When Miriam grew up, she had not grown up knowing what insufficiency felt like.

The Man Who Made It Rain

The story of her father began in a drought. A terrible famine had gripped the land, and Nakdimon went to a Roman governor with a proposal: lend him twelve wells of water to supply the city's needs, and he would repay them by a fixed date. If he failed, he would owe twelve talents of silver.

The deadline came. Not a drop of rain had fallen. The governor came to collect.

Nakdimon went to the Temple and prayed. He did not negotiate with the governor. He prayed, and the clouds arrived, and the rain fell in such abundance that the twelve wells were full before nightfall. The governor, trying to argue that the day had already ended when the rain began, lost the dispute when Nakdimon pointed out that the sun was still technically in the sky. It had waited.

That was the house Miriam had grown up in. That was the scale of blessing she had understood as ordinary.

The Sages and the Insult She Would Not Accept

The Sages in Eikhah Rabbah did not argue with her assessment of her former life. They acknowledged the scale of what her father had been. But they gave her what they gave her, and she rejected it, and the text moves forward.

Rabban Yohanan ben Zakkai, one of the towering figures of post-Temple Judaism, was present in some versions of this encounter. He said: happy are you, Israel. When you do the will of God, no nation has power over you. And when you do not do the will of God, God gives you over not only to nations but to their beasts.

He said this specifically in the context of Miriam's story. The connection he drew was not gentle.

What She Did When Rome Came

The rest of the account is short. It records where Miriam daughter of Nakdimon was found when Jerusalem had fallen and the city was starving under Roman siege. She was on the street, picking barley grains out of horse dung.

The Talmudic sources specify: from between the hooves of horses belonging to the Arabs. Not from a warehouse. Not from a merchant. From the excrement of animals, searching for undigested grain that the horses had passed. Her feet, which had never carried her on a road without her servants laying down something first, were now on the ground, in the street, among animals.

Rabban Yohanan ben Zakkai saw her there, or heard about her, and the text records that he wept. He recited a verse from Deuteronomy: the tender and delicate woman among you, who has never in her life set the sole of her foot on the ground because of her tenderness and delicacy.

He did not say God was wrong. He did not say the verse was a curse. He wept and recited it and let it stand.

The Distance Between Perfume and Barley

What the rabbis recorded in this pair of scenes is the arithmetic of reversal. Five hundred gold dinars per day: an insult. Barley from horse dung: reality. The gap between those two things is not simply financial. It is a gap between a world in which the sun waited for your father's prayers and a world in which you search through excrement for something edible.

The story does not explain what Miriam did to deserve the reversal, or whether deserve is even the right frame. Eikhah Rabbah places her story in a cycle of accounts about Jerusalem's great families unmade by the Roman conquest. She is not presented as a villain. She is presented as a woman who was formed entirely by a world that no longer existed, left to survive in its rubble.

TragedyWealthWomenExileTemple Destruction
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From the tradition

Sources

3 sources

The texts this telling draws on, in full. Open a card to read inline, or expand it for a wider, quieter read.

Exempla of the Rabbis, No. 85Exempla of the Rabbis (Gaster, 1924)

In a year of terrible drought, Nakdimon ben Gorion, one of the three wealthiest men in Jerusalem, approached a Roman official and made a desperate bargain. He borrowed twelve wells full of water to supply the city's needs, promising to repay them by a certain date. If the wells were not refilled by then, Nakdimon would owe twelve talents of silver.

The deadline arrived. Not a drop of rain had fallen. The Roman came to collect his silver, practically gloating. Nakdimon asked for one more day. The Roman agreed. Noon passed. The afternoon wore on. The sky remained a sheet of burning copper.

The Roman went to the bathhouse, confident he would be richer by evening. At the same hour, Nakdimon went to the Temple. He wrapped himself in his prayer shawl, stood before God, and prayed: "Master of the Universe, it is known before You that I did not do this for my own glory, nor for the glory of my father's house, but for Your glory. So that the pilgrims would have water."

The sky darkened. Rain poured down in torrents. The twelve wells overflowed with fresh water.

The Roman emerged from the bathhouse to find the city drenched. But he had one objection: "The sun has already set. The rain fell after the deadline. You still owe me the silver." Nakdimon returned to the Temple and prayed again. The clouds parted. The sun broke through and shone once more before finally setting, extending the day itself beyond its natural limit. The Talmud in Taanit (19b-20a) records that the heavens bent twice for Nakdimon that day: once for rain, and once for sunlight.

Full source
Eikhah Rabbah 1:48Eikhah Rabbah

This account in Eikhah Rabbah belongs to a cycle of stories the Sages tell about the daughters of Jerusalem's wealthiest families, brought low when the city fell to Rome. Miriam daughter of Nakdimon came from a household of legendary riches; her family is named elsewhere among the great philanthropists of the city before the destruction. The Sages, administering her marriage settlement, allotted her five hundred gold dinars each day merely for a basket of perfume, an extravagant sum meant to honor her station.

Rather than receive it with gratitude, she stood and cursed the Sages, telling them to give such a paltry allowance to their own daughters. In her eyes the fortune was an insult. Rabbi Aha adds a sharp aside: "We, too, answered amen after her," meaning the Sages prayed that her curse rebound upon her, that she should indeed come to need far more and have nothing. The story then turns to its bitter fulfillment. Rabbi Elazar swears by the future consolation of Israel that he himself watched Miriam gathering scattered barley from the dung under the hooves of horses in the marketplace of Akko, reduced to scavenging the leavings of animals.

To her fate Rabbi Elazar applies a verse from the Song of Songs: "If you do not know, the fairest among women, go you out in the footsteps of the sheep and herd your kids, gediyotayikh" (Song of Songs 1:8). With the rabbinic device of reading a word against its plain meaning, he says: do not read gediyotayikh, "your kids," but geviyotayikh, "your corpses." The verse that once praised the fairest among women now marks her ruin, a measure-for-measure rebuke to the pride that scorned a fortune.

Full source
Exempla of the Rabbis, No. 135Exempla of the Rabbis (Gaster, 1924)

The daughter of Nakdimon ben Gorion, once among the wealthiest men of Jerusalem before the city's destruction, had fallen into such poverty that she gathered undigested grains from the dung of animals for her food. Her father had been so rich that the rabbis said his daughter's daily allowance for perfume and luxuries alone was enormous, yet after the catastrophe of the war with Rome the family's fortune was utterly gone, and she was reduced to scavenging for survival.

Rabban Yochanan ben Zakkai, the sage who preserved Torah learning by founding the academy at Yavneh after the Temple fell, came upon her and recognized who she was. Seeing the heir of a great house picking grain from filth, he wept, and his disciples wept with him at how far she had been brought down. He recalled how her father had given charity, and lamented that the measure given had not been enough to shield his children from such a fate.

Yochanan ben Zakkai did not leave her in her misery. He raised her up and arranged her marriage to one of his own disciples, restoring her to a household of dignity and learning. The tale carries a double weight. It is a warning about the impermanence of riches and the rabbinic teaching that one must give charity generously, lest one's own descendants come to depend on the charity of others. And it is a portrait of a leader who answered ruin not with despair but with action, lifting a fallen daughter of Jerusalem back into honor.

Full source