548 texts in Midrash Aggadah
Woman cannot keep a secret. A Hegemon twits a Jew with that saying, and is convinced of the truth by feigning illness and telling his wife under an oath, that he had become pregnan...
Miriam and her seven sons died as martyrs for their holy faith. Each of her sons refused to worship idols quoting the appropriate passages from the Bible. When the last boy was cal...
Rabbi Jehuda ben Hanina was traveling through Rome when he saw something that stopped him in his tracks. In the slave market — that brutal engine of the Roman economy where human b...
The beautiful son and daughter of R. Ishmael were sold as slaves, and were shut up by their masters in one room in order to obtain similarly beautiful children, not recognising one...
Zophnat, daughter of the high priest, was torn from everything she had ever known. Sold into slavery, she stood on the auction block while the seller stripped away her garments one...
When King Ptolemy of Egypt ordered the Hebrew Bible translated into Greek, the sages of Israel did not celebrate. They mourned. The day the Torah was rendered in a foreign tongue, ...
The Egyptians brought their case before Alexander of Macedon, and they were confident they would win. Their claim was simple: when the Israelites left Egypt during the Exodus, they...
Rabbi Akiva sat in a Roman prison, and his captors gave him a choice: abandon the Torah, or rot in chains. He chose the chains. The Roman authorities pressed him repeatedly. They o...
Rabbi Akiva was locked in a Roman prison, cut off from his students and colleagues. But the study of Torah does not stop for prison walls. Rabbi Johanan ben Nuri had an urgent ques...
In the dark years of Roman persecution, when teaching Torah was a crime punishable by death, two students of Rabbi Joshua went into hiding. They disguised themselves and moved care...
The students of Rabbi Akiba were traveling on a road between towns when they spotted a band of robbers approaching from the opposite direction. The bandits were armed and dangerous...
The son of Hananya joined a band of robbers and betrayed them to one of the great men of Rome. They found it out and killed him. In the funeral oration his father delivered, he tri...
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...
When the Roman siege tightened around Jerusalem, starvation became a weapon more terrible than any sword. Doeg ben Josef was a man of means — he offered a full measure of gold for ...
The story of Kamsa and bar Kam§a and the fall of Jerusalem. A man had company and had invited Bar Kamsa who was his enemy, by mistake. He afterwards turned him out in spite of his ...
Ankelos ben Kalinikos, nephew of the Roman Emperor Titus, was searching for truth. Despite being born into the most powerful family in the world, he felt a spiritual hunger that Ro...
It was the custom to present newly married people with a hen and a cock and once the Roman soldiers passing by caught the birds and ate them; the Jews then attacked them. This was ...
A young man and woman who were betrothed to one another were seized by raiders and sold into slavery. By cruel coincidence — or perhaps by providence — they were sold to the same m...
A man decided to divorce his wife. On paper, this was his right — Jewish law permitted a husband to initiate divorce proceedings under certain circumstances. But this man had a pro...
Short note of the destruction of Bet-Tur through the axle of the waggon. They used to plant trees on the birth of a child and afterwards used them at its wedding. These were once c...
The Romans led Rabbi Shimon ben Gamliel and Rabbi Ishmael ben Elisha to their execution together. Both were among the greatest sages of their generation, and both had been condemne...
Mesha, the king of Moab, heard the story of the Binding of Isaac and drew exactly the wrong conclusion. He learned that Abraham, the father of the Israelites, had been willing to s...
When the prophet Isaiah prayed for a sign to confirm that King Hezekiah would recover from his illness, God performed one of the most spectacular miracles in all of scripture: the ...
A laborer worked for his master for three full years, faithfully performing every task assigned to him. When the work was finally done, he approached his master and asked for his w...
A pious man did strange things, i. e., placed a young girl in his bed, &c., but was not suspected of any wrong by his disciples who found afterwards that they were justified in not...
A young Torah scholar died in the prime of his life, and his widow was inconsolable. He had been pious, devoted, careful in his observance of every commandment. Why would God take ...
Two boys walked past a group of Elders who were sitting together in study. One boy had his head covered, as was the custom of modesty and reverence. The other boy walked by with hi...
Story of the man who tried Hillel ’s patience by asking him irrelevant questions, in the hope of angering him and thereby vanning a wager of 400 zuzim. The first question was: “Why...
Nakdimon ben Gorion was one of the wealthiest men in Jerusalem, and he had made a dangerous bargain. He borrowed twelve wells of water from a Roman nobleman — the Hegemon — promisi...
The tribe of Asher received its inheritance in a strip of land along the northern coast of the Land of Israel, and the blessing that Moses gave them proved spectacularly true: "Let...
R. Johanan b. Zakai was asked by R. Eleazar b. Arach permission to expound some of the mysteries of the creation (Ma’ase Merkaba). R. Johanan dismounted from his ass, as angels mig...
Story of the dispute between R. Shimeon b. Gamliel, R. Meir and R. Nathan. Gamliel was a prince and wanted to make a distinction between himself and the other two scholars when the...
The story of the weasel and the well. Once a young girl, beautifully dressed, lost herself in the desert on her way home. Getting very thirsty and seeing a well with a rope and a b...
Someone once asked Rabbi Akiva a question that seemed simple but carried enormous weight: "How great is the value of the Torah?" Rabbi Akiva did not hesitate. "Each word of the Tor...
The judgment of poor, rich, and young after death when they neglect study. The poor man who pleads want of 75 - means is compared to Hillel who was wont to work all day for a very ...
Eleazar, the son of Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai, inherited more than his father's wisdom. He inherited superhuman strength. One day, Eleazar was sitting at a lavish meal — and when Ele...
Rabbi Eleazar ben Shimeon was not a small man, and the Talmud does not hide this fact. Multiple stories describe his extraordinary physical size, his immense strength, and — as thi...
R. Eleazar b. Shimeon was a very strongly built man and used to carry people across the river upon his shoulders. Once the Prophet Elijah came to him in the form of an old man and ...
R. Eleazar b. Shimeon, who was appointed an official of the government, was accustomed to catch thieves in a very clever way when he found them drinking very heavily in the drinkin...
Rabbi Judah took upon himself the education of the daughter of Rabbi Tarfon, raising her in Torah and wisdom. It was an act of extraordinary devotion — accepting responsibility for...
Rabbi Akiba, the greatest sage of his generation, did not begin his life as a scholar. Until the age of forty, he was an illiterate shepherd who could not read a single letter of H...
Rabbi Akiva sat in judgment over a case that would become one of the most famous legal rulings in all of rabbinic literature. A man had publicly humiliated a woman by tearing the c...
Rabbi Akiba was standing by the shore when he witnessed something terrible. A man — someone Rabbi Akiba knew — fell into the sea. The waves swallowed him instantly. One moment he w...
Benjamin the Righteous served as the guardian of the community charity fund. Every donation that came in, every disbursement that went out, passed through his honest hands. The peo...
During a terrible famine, King Monobaz opened the royal treasury and distributed everything inside it to the poor. Every coin, every jewel, every stored reserve of wealth that his ...
Nahum Ish Gamzu was a man whose name became his philosophy. Whatever happened to him, no matter how terrible, he would say "Gam zu l'tovah" — "This too is for the good." But the re...
Rabbi Shimon ben Antipatros had a reputation that troubled the sages of Israel. Travelers who stayed at his house reported something alarming: their host beat his guests. Not robbe...
A farmer once looked at his fields and made a calculation that seemed clever at the time. The Torah commands that a tenth of every harvest must be given as a tithe. The farmer deci...
