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The prophet Hosea was instructed to buy back his unfaithful wife for a price that seemed arbitrary — fifteen pieces of silver, and an homer of barley, and an half homer of barley (...
Joseph's brothers had carried their father's coffin up from Egypt to bury him in the Cave of Machpelah. At the mouth of the cave, Esau was waiting. "This grave is mine," Esau said....
The Torah says (Deuteronomy 21:23), His body shall not remain all night upon the tree, but thou shalt in any wise bury him that day; for he that is hanged is accursed of God. The M...
Rav Huna once woke to find that four hundred of his casks of wine had soured into vinegar. This was not an inconvenience. This was ruin. Word spread. Rav Yehudah, the brother of Ra...
(Genesis 6:6) is one of the most unsettling verses in the Torah: And it repented the Lord that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart. How could the All-Know...
A young man traveling through the country met a young woman, and they fell in love. When he had to leave her town, they swore to wait for each other until they could marry. "Who wi...
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...
A certain man in Jerusalem wanted to divorce his rich wife. The problem was that her marriage contract — her ketubah — stipulated a considerable sum to be paid to her in the event ...
Rabbi Akiva had a saying he repeated so often his disciples knew it by heart: Kol de'avid Rachmana letav avid — "Whatever the Merciful One does is done for the best." Once he was t...
A Greek philosopher came to Rabban Gamliel with a complaint disguised as a question. "Why," he asked, "should I give to the poor with a smile? Giving drains my purse. A smile on to...
A man in a certain town buried a sum of money in his garden for safekeeping. He thought no one had seen. He was wrong. His neighbor, watching through a gap in the wall, waited a da...
A poor man, unable to work, resolved to stay in his house and wait for God to provide. One day, when he had nothing at all to eat, a fat cow wandered through his open door. The man...
The Torah says (Numbers 16) that Korah led a rebellion against Moses and Aaron, and that the earth opened and swallowed him. What the Torah does not say — what the midrash fills in...
A poor but pious man had three silver pieces — all he had in the world. He took them to the mill, bought flour for his household, and walked home carrying the sack. On the way, at ...
The First Temple, the sages taught, held five tokens of God's nearness that the Second Temple lacked: the Ark and its cover, the sacred fire that came down from heaven, the Shekhin...
The sages taught that forty years before the Second Temple burned, its destruction had already begun to show in the quiet details only the priests could read. On Yom Kippur, the lo...
The wicked kingdom once sent two officers to the sages of Israel with a curious assignment: teach us your Torah. The manuscript was put into their hands, and three times over they ...
A man had publicly dishevelled the hair of a Jewish woman in the street, a humiliating act in the ancient world, where a married woman's covered hair was a point of dignity. Rabbi ...
A man had entrusted a sum of money to a neighbor, Bar Temalian, for safekeeping. When he came back to collect it, Bar Temalian lied to his face and said, I never received any money...
A man lay dying. He had ten sons. His wife, in a bitter moment late in the marriage, had once told him that only one of the ten was biologically his. The other nine were fathered b...
A king summoned Rabbi Joshua ben Chanania and pressed him with a hard question. Is your God really just? He creates some people blind, others lame, others deformed, through no faul...
Abraham the Carpenter lived in Jerusalem in the early medieval period. He worked wood, lived plainly, and over many years saved a small bag of gold. A neighbor coveted the gold, br...
The Emperor Antoninus once pressed Rabbi Judah the Prince with a sharp question. At the day of judgment, he said, neither body nor soul could be justly punished. The body would ple...
When Achan took the banned spoil from Jericho, the book of Joshua describes his crime with a strange fivefold repetition. They have transgressed my covenant which I commanded them;...
A strange statistic is buried in tractate Yoma. During the 410 years of the First Temple, only eighteen high priests served in succession. During the 420 years of the Second Temple...
A band of robbers once stopped a group of travelers and demanded to know who they were. Disciples of Rabbi Akiva, the travelers answered. The robbers lowered their weapons and said...
Two men died on the same day in the same city. One was a great and righteous sage. The other was a tax collector, a known sinner. Both funeral processions met in the same narrow st...
A fox once persuaded a wolf to slip into a Jewish household to help prepare the Shabbat meal. No sooner did the wolf step through the door than the whole household rose up and beat...
Two women lived as close friends in one of the towns of late antique Israel. One day one of them was kneading dough at her neighbor's house, and a gold dinar slipped out of her pur...
The book of Kings rarely spares a good word for King Ahab of the northern kingdom of Israel (reigned c. 874 to 853 BCE). He built a temple to Baal in Samaria, married Jezebel, and ...
Rabbi Joshua ben Levi, a third-century sage of the Land of Israel, was granted a companion on the road that no one else in his generation was offered. Elijah the prophet, the tirel...
The Talmud tells a parable about a king who planted a magnificent garden and hired two guards — one lame, one blind — reasoning that neither could steal the fruit. One day the lame...
For seven years after the destruction of the First Temple, the Sages say, the nations of the world cultivated their vineyards with no other manure than the blood of Israel. The soi...
Rabbi Elazar, the son of Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai, once condemned a man to death for a petty reason — the man had called him "Vinegar, son of Wine," a sly way of saying he was the b...
Simeon ben Shetach, president of the Sanhedrin in the first century BCE, had a problem in Ashkelon: eighty witches living together in a cave, working malevolent magic that terroriz...
Rabbi Yehoshua, the son of Korcha, heard the story from an old man of Jerusalem who had lived through the Babylonian destruction. In the valley below the city, Nebuzaradan — captai...
A philosopher once came to Rabbi Eliezer with what he thought was an airtight argument against Jewish prophecy. He cited (Malachi 1:4), where God says of Edom, "They shall build, b...
The prophet Elijah was traveling through the world with a disciple — the kind of journey the Sages often assigned Elijah in their stories, testing whether his disciple could see th...
Alexander of Macedon, conqueror of empires, traveled beyond the known world and arrived at a place called Afriki — a kingdom in the far south. He had come, as he came everywhere, h...
When Alexander of Macedon conquered Egypt, a delegation of Egyptian nobles came before him with a centuries-old complaint against the Jews. They pointed to the book of Exodus itsel...
A poor person came to a woman's door and gave her a dinar — a silver coin — to hold for safekeeping. She took it and, with characteristic absentmindedness, set it down near the flo...
Rabbi Yochanan ben Elazar owned a tree whose branches had grown out over his neighbor's field. The neighbor had never complained — rabbinic scholars were generally given deference ...
Rabbi Rabina, a fifth-century Babylonian Sage, once learned from Rabbi Tabut (also called Tabyome) that there was a place on earth where truth was not an ethical preference but a l...
Rabbi Akiva was standing on a shore — the Talmud places the scene at the edge of the Mediterranean — when a ship offshore broke apart in a storm. He watched passengers thrown into ...
A woman was left in the care of her brother-in-law while her husband was away on a long journey. The brother-in-law pressed her to commit adultery. She refused. Furiously, he accus...
Rabbi Meir left the synagogue one afternoon earlier than usual. His colleagues noticed. Rabbi Meir was not a man who cut services short. When he finally explained himself, the stor...
Rava said something that rabbis are not supposed to say. "Life, children, and sufficient livelihood," he taught, "do not depend on merit. They depend on mazal — on the star under w...
