1,870 related texts · 10 related myths · Page 36 of 39
The Midrash of the Ten Commandments, a medieval midrashic anthology organized around the Decalogue that was popular in Jewish communities from Spain to Yemen in the eleventh and tw...
In the days when Alexander the Great marched through Asia, the Ishmaelites came before him with a lawsuit. They claimed Canaan. They were descended from Abraham, they argued; the I...
Rabbi Hoshaya ben Levi discovered a numerical poem in an old Aggadah book. Gaster's Exempla (1924), No. 285, preserves it in four lines. The Torah contains one hundred seventy-five...
When Moses ascended to receive the Torah (Exodus 19), an angel stood at the gate of Heaven and refused him entry. "This is not your place," the angel said. "You are made of earth. ...
In one Jewish town, the leaders of the community had developed a custom of carrying a Torah scroll with them when they went to meet the king on ceremonial visits. The Torah in its ...
A gentile heard about the honor paid to the High Priest in Jerusalem and decided he wanted the office for himself. He came first to Shammai and asked to convert on the condition th...
The Talmud tells of Elisha ben Abuyah, called afterward Acher, "Other", one of the four sages who entered the mystical Garden and the only one who emerged a heretic. Somewhere in t...
A gentile once came to Shammai asking to be made a proselyte, but only on condition that he be taught the Written Torah and not the Oral. Shammai sent him away with sharp rebuke. T...
A pagan once approached Rabban Yochanan ben Zakkai, the sage who had smuggled himself out of besieged Jerusalem inside a coffin and refounded Judaism at Yavneh. And said bluntly, "...
The kabbalists posed a problem that sounds simple until you sit with it: no one is truly perfect unless he has observed all 613 mitzvot. And yet, who has ever done so? Not even Mos...
When the Torah laid out the rules for Israel's king, it gave three specific warnings. In Deuteronomy 17, Moses wrote that the king shall not acquire for himself many horses. He sha...
King Solomon warned a skilled builder, the man who had constructed his palace, that the builder's wife was unfaithful. The builder refused to believe it. Solomon did not argue. He ...
A man walking across a frozen field saw a snake lying stiff in the snow. Touched by pity, he picked up the creature, placed it inside his shirt against his chest, and continued on....
The Talmud in Nedarim asks an uncomfortable question: why did the children of Abraham, the father of faith, endure two hundred and ten years of Egyptian bondage? What did Abraham, ...
The throne of King Solomon, the legend-weavers said, was a marvel of engineering and meaning. It was made entirely of gold, with thirty-three steps ascending to the seat. On every ...
On the sixth day, the earth gets its turn. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 1:24) echoes the pattern already set in the sea: every living creature comes forth "the kind that is c...
Verse 14 is the hardest word in this chapter, and Targum Pseudo-Jonathan does not round its edges. The uncircumcised male, unless he have someone to circumcise him, shall be cut of...
Where was Isaac during all this? The Torah says he was "coming from Beer-lahai-roi." Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 24:62) tells us something far more specific. He was coming f...
The Torah says Joseph told his steward to "slaughter an animal and prepare" a meal for his brothers. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan hears more than catering. It hears halacha. "Bring the m...
Pharaoh is specific about the travel arrangements. He thinks of the women. He thinks of the children. He thinks of the honor due an aged patriarch. "Thou, Joseph, shalt appoint for...
Moses has asked for a sign. God gives him a sign stranger than any wonder. "But He said, Therefore My Memra shall be for thy help; and this shall be the sign to thee that I have se...
The fifth and deepest verb of redemption arrives in the next verse. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan preserves it with covenantal precision: I will bring you nigh before Me to be a people, a...
Until the night before the Exodus, time belonged to Egypt. The calendar that mattered was the calendar of Pharaoh, its new year set by the flooding of the Nile. Targum Pseudo-Jonat...
Leftovers are rarely a theological problem, but in the Pesach laws they become one. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Exodus 12:10) addresses what to do with any remnant of the lamb that ...
The Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Exodus 13:9) hears a strange instruction and decodes it into practice. The verse says the deliverance from Egypt shall be "a sign upon your hand, and...
The Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Exodus 13:14) imagines the future. A son, born long after Egypt, looks at his father performing the strange ritual of redeeming a firstborn donkey wi...
The Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Exodus 13:16) closes the tefillin section with a repetition that is not really a repetition. Once again the text says the Exodus must be inscribed an...
Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Exodus 16:29) transforms a short Hebrew verse into the founding document of the Sabbath's geography: Behold, because I have given you the Sabbath, I gave...
Before the Ten Words were spoken, Moses did something remarkable, he spoke back to God. "The people cannot come up to Mount Sinai," he said, "because You Yourself instructed us, sa...
How did the Ten Words arrive? The Targum Pseudo-Jonathan describes it with cosmic theatre. "The first word, as it came forth from the mouth of the Holy One, whose Name be blessed, ...
The Targum Pseudo-Jonathan describes each commandment at Sinai the same way, as a living body of fire. The second word traveled exactly as the first. "Like storms, and lightnings, ...
After the thunder and the twelve-mile retreat, the people beg Moses to speak to them instead of God. And Moses answers with a line that still echoes. "Fear not; for the glory of th...
The Targum Pseudo-Jonathan preserves one of the strangest laws in the Torah. "If thou wilt make an altar of stones unto My Name, thou shalt not build them sculptured; for if thou l...
The recipe for the holy anointing oil is exact and extravagant: five hundred minas of myrrh, two hundred and fifty of sweet cinnamon, two hundred and fifty of sweet calamus, five h...
The people took off the ornaments they had received at Sinai. What happened to them? Targum Pseudo-Jonathan, the Aramaic paraphrase of the Torah, answers with a detail the plain te...
The morning after receiving the command, Moses did not delay. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan, the Aramaic paraphrase of the Torah, gives us the pre-dawn discipline of the prophet. "He hewe...
The renewed covenant included a reminder of the annual rhythm that would shape Jewish life forever. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan, the Aramaic paraphrase of the Torah, preserves the comma...
The number forty runs through the Torah like a drumbeat. Forty days of flood in Noah's time. Forty years in the wilderness. And here, in (Exodus 34:28) as preserved by Targum Pseud...
At the very heart of it all, there is ONE God. Absolutely eternal. Completely self-sufficient. As Rabbi Maimonides, the great medieval Jewish philosopher and legal scholar, emphasi...
Before the sun, the moon, the stars... before anything? Jewish tradition has some pretty mind-bending answers, and one of the most fascinating involves the Torah. Not just the one ...
The story of the Akeidah, the binding of Isaac, is one of the most powerful and disturbing in the Hebrew Bible. We usually focus on Abraham's faith, Isaac's (near) sacrifice, and G...
Bereshit Rabbah turns to Jacob's Heavenly Vision. The Torah tells us (Gen. 28:10-19) that Jacob dreamt of a ladder set upon the earth, its top reaching to heaven, with angels ascen...
The great Moses himself had such an experience. As we read in (Exodus 4:24), on the road one night, Adonai, God, encountered Moses and sought to kill him. Why would God, who had ju...
It might seem harsh At first, The verse that sparks this discussion is from (Numbers 5:2): "Command the children of Israel, and they shall send out from the camp every leper and ev...
The ancient rabbis grappled with these questions constantly, searching for meaning in misfortune. One particularly fascinating exploration revolves around the affliction of leprosy...
Bamidbar Rabbah turns to Inheriting the Land Depends on Covenantal Fidelity. The Bamidbar Rabbah, a collection of Midrashic (rabbinic interpretive commentary) teachings on the Book...
The verse in question is (Numbers 5:12): "Speak to the children of Israel, and say to them: If the wife of any man will stray and commit a trespass against him." It But the Rabbis ...
Bamidbar Rabbah opens the laws of the nazir, the person who vows to abstain from wine and grapes in order to dedicate himself to God. The text immediately connects abstaining from ...
