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There is a tradition, preserved in the Ma'aseh Book and cited in Gaster's Exempla of the Rabbis (no. 1, 1924), that ten kings will have ruled over the whole world before history fi...
A Roman matrona — a noblewoman who liked to corner rabbis with hard questions — came to Rabbi Joshua and asked him something she thought he could not answer. "If God finished His w...
Alexander of Macedon stopped, so the sages tell it, to test the elders of the Negev with ten hard questions. Some of their answers have come down to us, and they show a people conf...
Rav Acha taught that before Adam was created, God turned to the ministering angels and consulted with them. "Shall we make man?" He asked. The angels answered honestly: "What good ...
King David, lying on his couch one evening, let his thoughts wander through the corners of creation he could not make sense of. "Of what use is the spider in this world?" he asked ...
Abraham stepped out of the cave where he had been hidden as an infant, and for the first time saw the world above ground. He looked up and saw the sun climbing, enormous and warm, ...
Abdimos the Gardite once approached Rabbi Meir with one of the largest possible questions. "Tell me," he said, "how was the earth created?" Rabbi Meir did not open a book or begin ...
The rabbis divided the first day of Adam's life into twelve hours, and read his whole arc, from dust to exile, into a single daylight. In the first hour the dust was gathered from ...
The prophet Isaiah puts a complaint into the mouth of Zion. The Lord has forsaken me, my Lord has forgotten me (Isaiah 49:14). The community of Israel, in the Talmud's reading, spe...
Rabbi Moshe ben Maimon, known by Jews as the Rambam and by the wider world as Maimonides (1138 to 1204), did something no one had done before him. He took the vast, tangled ocean o...
Rabbi Elazar and Rabbi Yehoshua, two of the sages who witnessed the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE and helped to rebuild Jewish life in the generation that followed, wer...
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...
When Solomon set out to build the Temple, he faced a strange obstacle hidden in plain sight in the Torah. Scripture says that "the house, when it was in building, was built of ston...
The Sages had a quiet problem to solve. The Torah insists that on the seventh day God rested from all the work of creation — yet the world is full of objects that seem to lie outsi...
The Sages of the Talmud were obsessed with the question of when the Mashiach would come — and fiercely allergic to anyone who tried to nail it to a date. Sanhedrin 97 preserves bot...
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 ...
At creation, Gaster's Exempla (1924), No. 156, tells, the lower waters of the tehom — the primordial abyss — tried to surge upward and swallow the heavens. To hold them back, God c...
A group of philosophers once traveled to Rome and put a question to the elders of the Jewish community there. "If your God takes no pleasure in idolatry," they asked, "why does He ...
Rabbi Eliezer and Rabbi Yehoshua were aboard a ship when a storm drove them far out into the open ocean. The wind pushed them into waters no Jew had reason to visit. Rabbi Eliezer,...
The prophet Ezekiel writes, "I have set Jerusalem in the midst of the nations, and countries are round about her" (Ezekiel 5:5). Taken in its plain sense, the verse places the holy...
A Roman emperor once boasted to Rabbi Joshua ben Chananiah that he wished to throw a banquet large enough to entertain the God of Israel. The rabbi looked at him gravely and said, ...
A min — a sectarian — once argued with Rabbi Ami against the resurrection of the dead. "How can God bring back bodies that have returned to dust?" he demanded. "The dust scatters; ...
The Roman governor Turnus Rufus loved to bait Rabbi Akiva with theological questions. One day he asked, "Why is the Shabbat distinguished from other days?" Akiva answered with a qu...
A Roman emperor once asked Rabbi Joshua ben Hananiah a question designed to be unanswerable: do the dead truly return to life? "They have become dust," the emperor said. "How can d...
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...
A Roman emperor once challenged Rabban Gamliel with a question that sounds modern. If there is a God in the world, why does He not reveal Himself directly? Why not speak face to fa...
A philosopher named Proklos, son of Filoslos, once pressed Rabban Gamliel with a hard question. “If the idols of the nations are false, why does your God not simply destroy t...
Before the world had shape, it had nothing. No animals. No people. Not even a horizon. The Aramaic of Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 1:2) calls it tohu va-vohu, rendered as "va...
When the Torah says simply "and God called the light Day, and the darkness He called Night," Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 1:5) pauses to explain why. Naming, in the Targum, i...
The Torah says God "made the firmament." Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 1:7) gives us a sculptor's hand. The Lord, the Aramaic says, made the expanse upbearing it with three fi...
On the third day, God speaks and the oceans obey. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 1:9) specifies what the Torah leaves vague: it is the lower waters — the ones that remain benea...
The third day finishes with a command that sounds almost agricultural. In Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 1:11), the Lord tells the earth to "increase the grassy herb whose seed...
The Torah tells us the sun, moon, and stars are for "signs and seasons, days and years." Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 1:14) lets this sentence breathe. The luminaries, in the...
This is one of the strangest moments in Targum Pseudo-Jonathan's creation story — and one of its most famous. The Torah simply says God made "two great lights." The Targum on (Gene...
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 ...
Here the Targumist drops a myth into the middle of the verse. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 1:21) says the Lord created the great tanninim — sea dragons — and among them Levia...
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...
The Torah ends the sixth day's first act with a simple line: God saw that it was good. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 1:25) repeats the clean/unclean doubling — beast of the ea...
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...
Humans get fruit and vegetables. Animals get green leaves. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 1:30) preserves the original vegetarian economy of Eden — "to every beast of the earth...
The Torah says simply that God finished His work by the seventh day. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 2:2) smuggles in one of Judaism's most famous traditions: "the ten formation...
The Torah says God blessed the seventh day and sanctified it. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 2:3) lets the sentence expand: the Lord blessed the seventh day more than all the d...
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's "a mist went up from the earth" becomes, in Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 2:6), something far grander. "A cloud of glory descended from the throne of glory, and wa...
