9,687 related texts · Page 54 of 202
It started from a rooftop. Late one evening, David—king of Israel, conqueror of nations, the man after God's own heart—looked down from his palace and saw a woman bathing. Her name...
Solomon spent seven years building God's house. He spent thirteen building his own. Josephus does not hide the contrast—the Temple had God's help, he writes, which is why it went f...
Solomon had seven hundred wives and three hundred concubines. And they destroyed him. That is the blunt verdict of Josephus, who watched the wisest king in Israel's history slide i...
King Josiah was eight years old when he inherited the throne of Judah. His grandfather Manasseh had been the worst king in the nation's history—a man who slaughtered prophets until...
The kingdom that Josiah rebuilt fell apart the moment he died. Josephus records that when Pharaoh Neco marched through Judah on his way to fight the Babylonians at the Euphrates, J...
After Alexander the Great died in 323 BCE, his empire shattered into warring kingdoms. Ptolemy, son of Lagus, seized Egypt—and Jerusalem along with it. Josephus records that Ptolem...
The crisis started from within. Josephus records that after the High Priest Onias III died, a power struggle erupted between his brothers. Jason and Menelaus each bribed the Seleuc...
After routing the Seleucid armies, Judas Maccabeus did not rest. Josephus records that the surrounding nations, alarmed by the sudden revival of Jewish power, attacked Jewish commu...
Demetrius I, a Seleucid prince who had escaped captivity in Rome, seized the Syrian throne and immediately turned his attention to Judea. Jewish collaborators, led by the corrupt H...
When Trypho murdered his brother Jonathan, Simon, the last surviving son of Mattathias, took command. He was the eldest of the five brothers and the only one still alive. Josephus ...
Julius Caesar did something remarkable for the Jews. In a series of decrees preserved by Josephus in his Antiquities (written c. 93 CE), the Roman dictator formally guaranteed Jewi...
When Rome imposed a census on Judea in 6 CE, most Jews grudgingly complied. One man declared that paying taxes to Caesar was slavery, and slavery was a sin against God. According t...
And the answer, in its purest form, is surprisingly simple: God wanted to share the goodness. That's the core idea we find in Kalach Pitchei Chokhmah, a Kabbalistic text whose name...
We, as humans, have limitations. A carpenter builds a table. A baker bakes bread. Each action stems from a specific skill, a specific power. But what about God? Does God have a spe...
In Kabbalah, the answer lies in a rather unexpected place: the Three Heads within Arich Anpin. Arich Anpin, often translated as "Long Face" or "Vast Countenance," is one of the Par...
We often think of age, experience, maybe even wisdom. But Jewish tradition, particularly a fascinating text called Kalach Pitchei Chokhmah (literally, "A Garland of Openings to Wis...
But according to the Tikkun (spiritual repair)ei Zohar, it holds the key to understanding exile, blessing, and ultimately, redemption. When the prophet saw Israel in exile, what ga...
A man dreamed that beneath a bridge in Vienna, there was buried treasure. He traveled all the way to Vienna, found the bridge, and stood there trying to figure out how to dig witho...
The Mekhilta traces a prophetic thread that spans nearly the entire Hebrew Bible, connecting a drunken curse in Genesis to a divine promise in the book of Joel. When the prophet Jo...
The Mekhilta, the tannaitic midrash on Exodus, asks a devastating question about the plague of the firstborn. The verse says God struck down "until the captive firstborn" — includi...
(Exodus 13:19) "For hashbea hishbia the children of Israel": He (Joseph) had made them (his brothers) swear ("hashbea") that they would beswear ("hishbia") their children. R. Natha...
The place where Israel camped before crossing the Red Sea bore a name loaded with meaning. The Mekhilta offers multiple interpretations of "Chiroth" — and each one tells a differen...
Now the nations will clang to us like a bell, saying: Now if these (Jews), who were under their thumb, they let go and they left, why should we send to Aram Naharayim and to Aram T...
The Mekhilta cites Jacob's blessing to Joseph — "I have given you an additional portion over your brothers, which I took from the hand of the Emori with my sword and with my bow" (...
The Mekhilta draws a precise set of parallels between the Egyptian oppression of Israel and the punishment that God inflicted at the Red Sea, showing that every detail of the destr...
The Mekhilta continues its grammatical investigation of the Song at the Sea and finds yet another future-tense verb. (Exodus 15:7) does not say "He has consumed them as stubble" — ...
When Amalek attacked the Israelites at Rephidim—the first nation to wage war against the newly freed slaves—Moses turned to his student Joshua with a command (Exodus 17:9): "Choose...
When a Hebrew slave chooses to remain in servitude rather than go free at the end of his six-year term, the Torah prescribes a specific ritual: his master takes an awl and bores th...
The Torah states: "And one who steals a man and sells him, and he is found in his hand, he shall be put to death" (Exodus 21:16). The Mekhilta asks what this verse adds, since kidn...
The Torah says about a kidnapper: "and sells him" (Exodus 21:16). The Mekhilta derives from this phrasing that the kidnapper is liable only if he sells the entire person, not half....
Rabbi Levi suggests a difference in timing. When the Holy One, blessed be He, judges the nations of the world, it happens at night, a time when they are asleep, supposedly free fro...
King David certainly did. In Midrash Tehillim, a collection of rabbinic teachings on the Book of Psalms, we find David crying out, "I call to You, O Lord, my rock, do not be deaf t...
The Midrash (rabbinic interpretive commentary) uses a parable to illustrate this point, a story that paints a vivid picture. Imagine a king, journeying through the desert with his ...
Rabbi Judah tells us that in Sodom, a truly horrific decree was issued: anyone who dared to help the poor, even with a simple loaf of bread, would be burned alive. Imagine living i...
Jewish tradition certainly understands that feeling, and sometimes, it uses stark contrasts to drive home the point. Today, we're diving into a passage from Sifrei Devarim, specifi...
The verse references Shimon, one of Jacob's sons, and it says, "His (Shimon's) hands did battle for him." This echoes a passage from Genesis (Bereshith 34:25), "And there took, two...
The story of Dinah in Genesis 34 is already one of the most violent chapters in the Torah. The Targum Jonathan, the ancient Aramaic translation, does not soften it. Instead, it sha...
Leviticus 25 introduces the sabbatical year and the Jubilee. The Targum Jonathan addresses the most obvious objection: if the land rests every seventh year, what will people eat? G...
The Blessing of Moses in (Deuteronomy 33) gets the full Targum treatment—every tribe's destiny expanded, every blessing loaded with specifics the Torah never mentions. It opens wit...
The Jewish people were redeemed from Egypt because of the righteous women. According to Sotah 11b, Rav Avira taught that while the men had given up hope under Pharaoh's slavery, th...
The Hebrew Bible calls Moses "the man of God" (Deuteronomy 33:1). Targum Onkelos adds one word: "the prophet of God." Moses is not merely a man who belongs to God. He is a prophet—...
It was in the days of Antiochus, king of Greece, he was a great and mighty king, he was powerful in his governance, and all kings listened to him. He conquered many countries and m...
The wicked kingdom once decreed that the Jews should not keep the Sabbath, nor circumcise their children, nor keep the law of purification according to the Bible. Reuben the son of...
The Jews being prevented by decree from studying, Pappos met R. Akiba who had defied that decree. Rebuked by Pappos Akiba replied: “A fox on the shore of the sea saw some fish hidi...
Rome had issued a decree: no new rabbis could be ordained. The empire understood that as long as the chain of rabbinic authority remained unbroken, the Jewish people could never tr...
Eliezer b. Hyrkanos went to Jerusalem to study whilst his father and brothers fled with their goods from the attack of the Roman soldiers. He starved and was discovered by R. Johan...
King Shapur of Persia once asked the sage Shmuel: "Tell me what I will see in my dream tonight." It was a test — could a Jewish sage truly predict what a foreign king would dream? ...
The city of Lod — Lydda — was no stranger to Roman cruelty. But the story of its two most famous martyrs, Pappos and Lulianos, stands out even among the darkest chapters of persecu...
