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Gaster's exemplum No. 438, drawn from the Gaster Hebrew manuscripts, tells the story of a stubborn merchant who decided to prove that a person can lose his property any time he wan...
Two great tannaim weighed the ethics of the courtroom. Rabbi Ishmael taught: when an Israelite and a stranger come before you in judgment, acquit the Israelite by the laws of Israe...
The sages taught that the Land of Israel was not destroyed until seven royal courts had turned to idolatry. They counted them by name: Jeroboam son of Nebat, Baasha son of Ahijah, ...
Rabbi Abahu once praised Rav Saphra before a group of heretics, calling him a man of great learning. The heretics, impressed, exempted Saphra from tribute for thirteen years. One d...
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 ...
When Sennacherib the Assyrian emperor came against Jerusalem, his pride was as tall as his army. The midrash tells how God humbled him in a sequence of ordinary-seeming errands. Fi...
Rabbi Judah was asked a difficult question about divine justice: how can body and soul be judged together when one is mortal and the other eternal? He answered with a parable. A ki...
Rav Huna, the third-century head of the Babylonian academy at Sura, owned a vineyard and hired laborers to work it. One harvest day he refused to share wine with the men who were w...
When Nebuchadnezzar carried Judah into exile, his officers wanted the captives dead. These men are men of death, they said. They refuse to obey the king's order. Execute them. One ...
The halachah is clear: a man must not leave the synagogue before the chazzan finishes the Amidah, and must not pass a synagogue without entering it to pray. Gaster's Exempla (No. 3...
A young man rode from Tiberias to Betar and met a young woman who fell in love with him on sight. They married within days. A year later she asked him to bring her to visit her par...
A man walked a hot road carrying a jug of milk. He heard a thin, desperate noise near the verge. A snake, dying of thirst. The man knelt, tilted the jug, and gave the snake enough ...
Acheer once pressed Rabbi Meir with a hard verse: God also has set the one over against the other (Ecclesiastes 7:14). What did it mean? Rabbi Meir offered the simple answer. The H...
Kings are remembered in lists, and the sages kept careful accounts. For Hezekiah, they drew up two columns. On one side, the three things they praised him for. First, he dragged th...
The Rabbis of Rosh Hashanah 17a sorted the afterlife into categories. Most of the wicked — those guilty of ordinary sins, the ones who grew coarse through sensuous indulgence rathe...
The Midrash preserves a legend that the Tanakh only whispers at. When Isaac died, his two sons came to bury him. "His sons Esau and Jacob buried him" (Genesis 35:29), the written T...
When the Torah laid out the rules for Israel's king, it gave three specific warnings. In Deuteronomy 17, Moses wrote that the king shall not acquire for himself many horses. He sha...
Rabbi Shela once punished a man who had sinned with a non-Jewish woman. The offender, smarting under the beating, reported the Rabbi to the king. Jewish courts were not supposed to...
A Roman official named Hadrakitilios wrote a troubled letter to the Emperor Hadrian. "Clearly the God of the Jews hates me," he wrote. "I do not circumcise myself as the Saracens d...
When Titus sacked Jerusalem in 70 CE, the Talmud tells us, he did not content himself with fire and slaughter. He stripped the Temple of its sacred vessels, wrapped them in the vei...
The Talmud in Nedarim asks an uncomfortable question: why did the children of Abraham, the father of faith, endure two hundred and ten years of Egyptian bondage? What did Abraham, ...
The Talmud in Maccoth preserves a remarkable teaching: Moses pronounced four severe judgments over Israel, and four later prophets rose up and softened them. This is not rebellion....
Rabbi Ishmael ben Yossi had a tenant who tended his vineyard. Every Friday, the man brought a basket of grapes to the Rabbi’s door — the standard portion owed to the la...
The tale is told of a certain Abu Golis, a pagan priest in the city of Damascus who later lived in Tiberias. He served an idol and prospered in its shadow, taking what he pleased o...
The Torah tells the story quickly — too quickly, the rabbis felt. Dinah, the daughter of Jacob and Leah, was taken and violated by Shechem, the prince of the local city. Her ...
Before he was king, Solomon was a young boy with a gift for untangling impossible lawsuits. The tradition collected in the Parables of Solomon preserves one such case. A wealthy an...
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...
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...
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...
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'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...
Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 3:14) tells us the original serpent was not a crawling thing. God "brought the three unto judgment" — Adam, Eve, and the serpent — and pronounced...
The Torah says God will put enmity between the serpent and the woman's seed. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 3:15) turns that enmity into a long, conditional war with an ending....
Eve's sentence in the Torah is brief. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 3:16) weighs it. "Multiplying, I will multiply thy affliction by the blood of thy virginity, and by thy con...
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 Torah says simply, "to dust thou shalt return." Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 3:19) refuses to let that be the end. After the dust, the Targumist says, there is one more a...
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...
The Torah's warning to Cain — "sin crouches at the door" — becomes, in Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 4:7), one of the clearest statements of Jewish free will in the entire Tor...
The Hebrew of (Genesis 4:8) is notoriously fragmentary: "Cain said to Abel his brother. And it came to pass, when they were in the field, Cain rose up against Abel his brother and ...
God's question to Cain after the murder is a pair of hammer blows. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 4:10) phrases it as: "What hast thou done? The voice of the bloods of the murd...
Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 4:11) continues the image. "Now because thou hast killed him, thou art cursed from the earth, which hath opened the mouth, and received the blood...
Cain's response to the curse, in Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 4:14), includes a nuance the Hebrew does not spell out. "Behold, Thou hast cast me forth today from the face of ...
What was the "mark of Cain"? The Torah only says God placed a sign on him so no one would kill him. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 4:15) tells us what the sign was. "The Lord s...
The Torah says Cain went to dwell in "the land of Nod." Nod in Hebrew means "wandering," and Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 4:16) translates it plainly: "the land of the wander...
Lamech's cryptic boast in the Torah — "I have slain a man to my wounding" — becomes, in Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 4:23), a defense plea. "Hear my voice, wives of Lemek, he...
Lamech's argument continues in Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 4:24). He does a piece of theological arithmetic in front of his wives. "For Cain who sinned and was converted by ...
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...
