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Look again at the opening of Genesis. "Zachar u-nekevah bara otam" — "male and female created He them" (Genesis 1:27). Why does the verse call the single creature otam, "them," if ...
Rabbi Eleazar said that the month of Tishri holds more Jewish history than any other. "Abraham and Jacob were born in Tishri," he taught, "and in Tishri they died. On the first of ...
Rabbi Judah bar Ilai was known for many fine qualities, but one of them became a teaching in itself. Whenever a bridal procession passed through the streets, Rabbi Judah would stop...
The midrash on Abraham's hospitality in Genesis 18 notices something small and opens it into a whole theology. The patriarch had just made a covenant with the peoples of the land. ...
A garland of proverbs preserved in rabbinic tradition, each short enough to carry in a pocket and long enough to last a lifetime. Unhappy is the one who mistakes the branch for the...
Rabbi Yehoshua of Sikhnin taught in the name of Rabbi Levi that when the Holy One, Blessed be He, prepared to fashion the first woman, He held a quiet council with Himself about an...
When Adam understood that his own transgression had drawn death into every future generation, he did not try to defend himself. He mourned. He fasted for one hundred and thirty yea...
The Kabbalists — the sages of truth, as the tradition calls them — noticed something about the Hebrew letters of Adam. The word אדם spells three names. Aleph for Adam. Dalet for Da...
The strangest word in the Torah's creation account is "us." "Let us make man in our image." The rabbis have spilled rivers of ink explaining who God was talking to. Targum Pseudo-J...
The Torah simply says God created Adam "male and female He created them." Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 1:27) hands us an anatomy textbook. The Lord created Adam "with two hun...
Before any commandment and before any punishment, humanity's first word from God is a blessing. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 1:28) tells us Adam and his wife were blessed and...
The Torah's provision for humanity is stated briefly: "every herb yielding seed, every tree yielding fruit, to you it shall be for food." Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 1:29) e...
Before there was rain, before there was agriculture, there was a waiting earth. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 2:5) explains the pause: "all the trees of the field were not as ...
The Torah says God formed man from the dust of the earth. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 2:7) takes this one sentence and turns it into a cosmic geography. "The Lord God create...
The Torah names two trees in the garden. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 2:9) tells us the dimensions of one of them. The Tree of Life, the Targumist says, stood "in the midst o...
The Torah says God placed the man in the garden "to work it and to guard it." Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 2:15) tells us where Adam came from and what the work really was. G...
The entire moral architecture of the Torah fits into one verse. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 2:17) renders it sharply: "of the tree of whose fruit they who eat become wise to...
Naming is an act of authority. In Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 2:19), the Lord creates every beast of the field and every fowl of the heavens and brings them to Adam "to see ...
The naming finished. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 2:20) closes the scene with a quiet loneliness: "Adam called the names of all cattle, and all fowl of the heavens, and all b...
The Torah says God took "one of his ribs" to make the woman. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 2:21) gets oddly specific. "He took one of his ribs, it was the thirteenth rib of th...
Adam wakes up and speaks. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 2:23) gives him a line with an unusual opening: "This time, and not again, is woman created from man." The Targumist is...
The serpent's opening move is not "you will not die." Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 3:4) sharpens the attack. "In that hour the serpent spake accusation against his Creator, a...
The Torah says Eve saw the tree was good for food. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 3:6) tells us she also saw something else. "The woman beheld Samael, the angel of death, and w...
The Torah says their eyes were opened and they knew they were naked. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 3:7) adds a detail that changes the image entirely. They realized "they were...
Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 3:8) uses a phrase it will return to again and again: "the Word of the Lord God" — the Memra, the divine speech as a presence in its own right. A...
The Torah's "Where are you?" is one of the shortest questions in Scripture. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 3:9) unfolds it. God calls to Adam and says, in the Targum's longer r...
Adam's answer, in the Torah, is evasive: "I was afraid because I was naked." Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 3:10) lets him say more. "The voice of Thy Word heard I in the garde...
God turns to the woman, and Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 3:13) lets Eve expand on the Hebrew's terse "the serpent beguiled me." In the Targum she says, "The serpent beguiled ...
Adam's sentence, in Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 3:17), includes an unusual charge. "Accursed is the ground, in that it did not show thee thy guilt; in labour shalt thou eat ...
The curse of thorns and thistles arrives, and for the first time in the story, Adam argues back. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 3:18) has Adam pray: "I pray, through mercies fr...
The Torah says God made "garments of skin" for Adam and his wife. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 3:21) tells us whose skin. "The Lord God made to Adam and to his wife vestures ...
Just as God consulted the angels to make humanity, He consults them again to remove humanity from paradise. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 3:22) records the divine deliberation...
Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 4:25) slows the Torah down. Adam did not immediately father another son after the murder. The Targumist tells us it took a hundred and thirty yea...
Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 5:3) reopens old wounds. "Adam lived a hundred and thirty years, and begat Sheth, who had the likeness of his image and of his similitude: for be...
This is one of those verses where Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 8:20) opens a hidden corridor through the whole Torah. The Hebrew simply says Noah built an altar. The Aramaic ...
Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 9:20) is one of the most dreamlike details in the whole Flood cycle. Noah began to be a man working in the earth. And he found a vine which the r...
Stand where the Temple will stand and look down. In Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 22:9), the mountain beneath Abraham's feet is not virgin ground. It is the oldest altar in th...
The Targum Pseudo-Jonathan adds a line that pulls the whole arc of Genesis together in one verse. The vestments Rebekah puts on Jacob, the Targum tells us, "had formerly been Adam'...
Rebekah's instruction to Jacob is urgent, and the Targum Pseudo-Jonathan adds a Genesis-deep lament to the end of it. "Why should I be bereaved of you both in one day: thou being s...
The Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Exodus 14:9) pictures a scene the Hebrew leaves blank. While Pharaoh's chariots thunder toward them, what is Israel doing? The Targum says they are g...
If you were God, and you had to create things above and below, which realm would you offend first? Midrash Tanchuma Buber, Bereshit 15:1 imagines the problem as a diplomatic crisis...
Creation had a schedule. Midrash Tanchuma Buber, Bereshit 17:1 records the Schools of Shammai and Hillel debating when the day began — and then offers a tidy accounting of what was...
(Genesis 2:3) ends with a grammatically odd phrase: God rested from all His work "which God had created to make." Not "which God had made." Which God had created to make. Midrash T...
It’s a question that's haunted philosophers and theologians for millennia, and Jewish tradition definitely has some answers. At the very heart of it all, there is ONE God. Absolute...
That’s what we’re talking about when we talk about God. famous verse from Exodus (3:14), where God tells Moses, "I shall be what I shall be." It’s so much more than just a name. It...
Having a voice, but God has feet that enable him to walk. In the Talmud, Rabbi Abahu said: "The Holy One, blessed be He, said: 'I am He who walked in the Garden of Eden'" (Taanit 2...
The Torah gives us a glimpse into such an experience with the story of the Ohel Mo'ed, the Tent of Meeting. The Book of Exodus describes how Moses would set up this tent "outside t...
In Jewish mysticism, there's a powerful story about exactly that – the story of the Shekhinah, the divine feminine presence, and her long journey to find a home. The kabbalists, th...
