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There is a strange debate preserved in tractate Berachot (folio 47, column 2) that asks a question most of us are afraid to ask out loud. Who, exactly, counts as an am ha'aretz — a...
The Talmud and early midrashic collections preserve rabbinic mishlei, proverbs, in loose clusters — one-line teachings meant to be memorized and turned over slowly. Here is a sampl...
A short, bitter parable preserved as Gaster's exemplum No. 210 teaches the kind of lesson a Jew is meant to carry with him into the street. A man was clearing his field of stones. ...
Gaster's exemplum No. 348 preserves a Jewish folk tale about the strangest accounting in the heavenly court. A wicked man died and was brought before the Holy One for judgment. The...
In the days of the Mishnah the rabbis regulated even the meals of mourning. At a funeral feast they ordered ten cups of wine to be drunk in the house of the bereaved — three before...
Several Talmudic stories describe sages who took advantage of a non-Jew's arithmetical error — and they are preserved without varnish, because the rabbis wanted the argument to be ...
Jewish law draws a careful line around the rituals of mourning — the seven days of shiva, the tearing of garments, the torn clothes and covered mirrors — and reserves them for the ...
The moment when Joseph's brothers recognized him in the palace at Memphis was, according to the midrash, more violent than the Torah lets on. Some of the brothers, the sages said, ...
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 Mo...
The Second Temple had a section called the Ezrat Nashim, the Court of Women — a gallery where women could gather for the great ceremonies while men stood on the lower floor. During...
The story takes two breaths. Hillel the Elder was returning from a journey and walking the final miles toward his home in Jerusalem. As he approached the city, he heard loud noise ...
A rich man once swore an oath before his sons that when he died he would leave each of them one hundred dinars. He had ten sons, so the promise totaled one thousand dinars. Then hi...
The Rabbis gave practical instructions for living in a town visited by plague. When pestilence walks the streets, do not walk down the middle of the road. The middle is where the a...
The Rabbis of Bava Metzia 29b worked out what a person owes to what he finds. If you discover a lost scroll in the road, you have duties of preservation, not enjoyment. You may unr...
The Sanhedrin of seventy-one was not a single institution. It was the top of a ladder, and Rabbi Yossi remembered the steps. In each city of Israel sat a provincial court of twenty...
A man in Jerusalem held a grand banquet. He had a friend named Kamtza and an enemy named Bar Kamtza. He sent his servant to invite Kamtza. The servant, confused by the similar name...
The Holy One has often worked wonders in the lives of His children at the hour of their greatest need. These miracles are recorded not for spectacle but as a brake against disbelie...
Rabbi Eleazar ben Shimon was known for his great body and his greater appetite. Once he went to visit Rabbi Yosef ben Laqania. They sat together, and Rabbi Yosef set out a meal tha...
One of Rabbi Akiva's students fell gravely ill, and no one in the household thought to care for him. He lay in a corner, forgotten, while the illness ran its course. Akiva heard ab...
The rabbis taught that Jerusalem was not like other cities. Ten laws applied to her alone, each one a small clue to her strange status. A mortgaged house there was never permanentl...
There were fifteen steps in the Temple that led down from the Court of Israel to the Court of the Women. The rabbis said they matched the fifteen Shir HaMa’alot, the Songs of...
The Mishnah in tractate Sotah teaches that four kinds of people tear down the world from within: foolish pietists, crafty villains, sanctimonious women, and self-afflicting Pharise...
There were two men in a distant country who had been friends since boyhood. When war broke out between their two nations, they were forced apart. Years passed. One day, one of the ...
Before the world has a single footstep of land-dwelling life, the fifth day brings a first wave of motion. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 1:20) asks the lakes of the waters to ...
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's famous line — "therefore a man leaves his father and mother and cleaves to his wife" — gets a pointed rewording in Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 2:24). A man "shal...
Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 4:22) gives us the first credits for human culture. Zillah bore Tubal-Cain, "the chief (rab) of all artificers who know the workmanship of brass ...
The Torah says, about the generation of Enosh, "then men began to call upon the name of the Lord." The Targumist reads this exactly the opposite way. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Gen...
Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on Genesis 7:13 narrows the entire human story down to a single doorway. On the day the Flood began, eight people walked through it — Noah, his three sons Sh...
Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on Genesis 8:9 tells one of the most delicate scenes in all of Torah. Noah sends out a dove, a yonah, to see whether the earth is ready. The Targum says she ...
Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on Genesis 9:10 widens the covenant after the Flood to include every creature, without exception. With every living soul that is with you, of birds, and of c...
Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on Genesis 9:27 turns a brief blessing into a vision of the whole future of learning. The Lord shall beautify the borders of Japhet, and his sons shall be pr...
Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on Genesis 10:2 does something the plain biblical list never does — it gives the sons of Japheth their addresses. Gomer, and Magog, and Madai, and Javan, and...
Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on Genesis 10:7 lists the sons of Kush, the son of Cham, and then spins out a gazetteer the Hebrew does not provide. Seba, and Havilah, and Sabta, and Raama,...
Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on Genesis 10:20 closes the genealogy of Cham with a summary line that quietly announces one of Torah's deepest ideas. These are the sons of Cham, according ...
Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on Genesis 10:32 closes the Table of Nations with a sentence that should make every reader pause. These are the houses of the sons of Noah, according to thei...
Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on Genesis 11:1 opens the story of the Tower of Babel with a claim so bold it has echoed through Jewish thought for two thousand years. All the earth was (of...
Read the verse in the Hebrew Bible and you hear only bricks and mortar. But open Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 11:4) — the expansive Aramaic paraphrase that fills the margins ...
Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 11:6) preserves a sentence that has given interpreters trouble for centuries. God looks down at the builders of Babel and says: they will not be ...
The plain verse in (Genesis 11:7) says only, Come, let us go down. The plural has troubled readers since antiquity. To whom is God speaking?Targum Pseudo-Jonathan answers without h...
Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 11:8) does not describe a gentle scattering. It describes a massacre.The Word of the Lord — the Memra, that favorite Targumic circumlocution for ...
The Hebrew Bible plays on words: the city is called Bavel because there the Holy One confused — balal — the tongues of the earth. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 11:9) preserves...
The journey that will become the spine of the Hebrew Bible begins not with Abram but with his father. In (Genesis 11:31) Terah takes his son, his grandson Lot, and his daughter-in-...
The most famous call in the Hebrew Bible lands on Abram's ear as a single imperative in (Genesis 12:1): Go forth. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan slows the verse down and makes you feel eac...
The verse is almost administrative. Abram leaves Haran at seventy-five. Lot goes with him. The Targum in (Genesis 12:4) does not embroider — and that restraint is the whole lesson....
The Hebrew of (Genesis 12:5) uses a strange phrase: the souls they had made in Haran. How does one make a soul?Targum Pseudo-Jonathan answers in a single word that opens a whole th...
The first place Abram stops in the land of promise is Shechem. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 12:6) preserves a sobering detail that the Hebrew Bible states simply and the Targ...
The Hebrew Bible in (Genesis 13:7) says only that there was strife between the shepherds. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan tells you what the strife was about, and the answer is an ethics le...
