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A woodcutter once complained of his hard life. He worked and carried heavy loads and could scarcely earn enough to live. One day in the wood he prayed to God and then fell asleep. ...
A young Jewish girl was sold into slavery to a Greek master. She was small and frightened, torn from her family, and carried to a foreign house where strange gods stood in every co...
Bar Hedya was a professional dream interpreter in the Talmudic era, and the Talmud (Berakhot 56a) reveals his scandalous method: he interpreted dreams based not on their content bu...
King Shapur of Persia once asked the sage Shmuel: "Tell me what I will see in my dream tonight." It was a test — could a Jewish sage truly predict what a foreign king would dream? ...
A woman came to Rabbi Eliezer with a dream she could not understand. She described it in detail — the images, the sequence, the feeling of it — and asked the great sage what it mea...
Maimonides — the great philosopher, physician, and legal authority — once interpreted a king's dream with such precision that the story entered the canon of Jewish wisdom tales alo...
This comprehensive article examines cosmogony (theories of universe origin) across biblical, post-biblical, and rabbinical Jewish traditions, comparing them with Babylonian and oth...
Lilith is described as a female demon in Jewish tradition. The name appears in (Isaiah 34:14) and derives from Assyrian demon mythology, though scholars debate whether it connects ...
The article describes the flood narrative from Genesis vi.9-ix.17, where God destroys humanity due to wickedness, sparing only Noah's family and two (or seven) pairs of every livin...
This extensive article by Kaufmann Kohler from the 1906 Jewish Encyclopedia explores the Jewish doctrine of "last things"—the final destiny of the Jewish nation and humanity. Escha...
The forecasting of the future by certain signs or movements of external things, or by visions in certain ecstatic states of the soul (see Dreams and Prophecy). Divination rests on ...
The name of a supernatural being mentioned in connection with the ritual of the Day of Atonement (Lev. xvi.). After Satan, for whom he was in some degree a preparation, Azazel enjo...
Plural word of unknown derivation used in the Hebrew Bible to denote the primitive Semitic house-gods whose cult had been handed down to historical times from the earlier period of...
Rabbi Eleazar ben Shimon, son of the great Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai, was appointed by the Roman government as an official — a kind of investigator authorized to catch thieves. He wa...
A min — a heretic, an opponent of the Rabbis' tradition — came to Rabbi Yishmael with a stack of strange dreams he wanted interpreted. He had clearly hoped that the Rabbi would pla...
A woman came to Rabbi Eliezer with a dream. She described what she had seen in the night. Rabbi Eliezer listened carefully and said: "You will bear a male child." In time, the woma...
When Alexander of Macedon marched east, the Samaritans — called in the Talmud the Kutim — saw a political opening. They sent word to Alexander asking him to destroy the Temple in J...
There was once a pious scholar who left behind a son, Rabbi Isaac, greater in learning and piety than himself, and a dayyan — a judge in the Jewish court. On the eve of Rosh Hashan...
A certain king once woke from a disturbing dream and could not remember what it contained. All he remembered was the terror. He called his wise men and demanded they tell him the d...
In a year of terrible drought, when the rains had not fallen and the fields were cracking, the people of Israel came to Honi the Circle-Maker and begged him to pray for them. Honi ...
Jews have always taken dreams seriously. The Talmud devotes pages to their meaning. But not every dream comes with an interpretation, and not every dreamer has a Joseph nearby to d...
A rich man, old and childless, prayed for years for a son. In his advanced age God granted him one. He named the boy Saul, after the first king of Israel, and lavished everything o...
The daughter of Rabbi Meir, one of the greatest sages of the second century CE, had a vision in a dream that her fate was sealed. Twenty-one years of suffering lay ahead. Seven yea...
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...
Rabban Gamliel II, grandson of Hillel and head of the Sanhedrin at Yavneh in the generation after the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE, was a brilliant man with a hard str...
An apostate — a Jew who had abandoned his people — invented a blood libel and decided to prove it. He found a bird, slaughtered it, drained its blood into a small bottle, and then ...
A wicked man lay on his deathbed. He had lived a long life of greed. He had never given charity. He had never sent food to a poor neighbor. His door had remained closed against eve...
A woman in a certain town had a reputation for extraordinary piety. She visited every household in which a woman had gone into labor. She prayed by the bedside. She comforted the m...
A pious man on a journey found a cave in the mountains. He entered. Inside was a small pool of water, and behind it, a narrower dark inner chamber. He stepped into the inner chambe...
The workers of Rav Nachman bar Yitzchak were clearing a small mound on the edge of a field when the earth gave way beneath their spades and a man sat up from the soil. He was fully...
Before Moses was born, Pharaoh had a dream. He saw a giant set of scales. On one side lay the entire weight of Egypt: the pyramids, the armies, the treasuries, the granaries, the p...
In the coastal city of Ashkelon, two men died on the same day. One was Baya, the local tax collector, a figure the community despised. The other was a gentle Torah scholar. Both pr...
Rabbi Ishmael was known as a master of dream-interpretation. Two students with identical dreams could come to him and walk away with opposite readings, because Ishmael understood t...
Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 9:24) adds a detail that quietly reshapes the whole story. The biblical Hebrew simply says Noah awoke and knew what his younger son had done to h...
As the sun dipped low over the divided animals, a tardemah fell on Abraham — a deep, prophetic sleep. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 15:12) uses that sleep to show him the whol...
The action shifts south. Abraham has traveled into the region of Gerar, called Sarah his sister instead of his wife, and the local king Abimelech has taken her into his household. ...
(Genesis 20:4) is remarkable for how boldly Abimelech speaks back to Heaven. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan: "But Abimelek had not come nigh to defile her; and he said, Lord, shall the son...
God answers Abimelech in (Genesis 20:6), and the Targum's rendering is extraordinary. "And the Word of the Lord said to him in a dream, Before Me also it is manifest that in the tr...
Jacob dreamed, and a ladder stood from earth to heaven (Genesis 28:12). The Targum Pseudo-Jonathan fills the rungs with specific traffic. The two angels on the ladder were not anon...
In the Torah, God simply stands beside Jacob in the dream (Genesis 28:13). The Targum Pseudo-Jonathan adjusts the posture with surgical care. What Jacob saw was not God Himself but...
Jakob told his wives the other half of the story — the half no one else had witnessed. At the time when the flocks conceived, that I lifted up my eyes and saw in a dream, and, beho...
In the dream, the voice said, Lift up now thine eyes and see. And Jakob saw exactly what had been promised: every goat rising upon the flock was spotted in its feet, streaked, or w...
It is one of the most famous dreams in the Hebrew Bible, and the Targum translates it with surgical calm. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 37:7) repeats the imagery almost unchan...
The brothers heard the dream and exploded. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 37:8) preserves their two-edged outrage in a single tight sentence. They did not just laugh at Joseph....
If the sheaf dream was shocking, the second dream was worse. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 37:9) stays close to the Hebrew: behold, the sun, and the moon, and eleven stars, bo...
When Joseph told his father the dream of the sun, the moon, and the eleven stars, Jacob rebuked him. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 37:10) reports the rebuke: What dream is thi...
The conspiracy speech of Joseph's brothers, preserved in Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 37:20), ends with a sentence that is, in its own dark way, one of the most revealing lin...
The Targum preserves a grammatical peculiarity that the Sages loved. They dreamed a dream, both of them, each man his dream in one night, each man his own dream, and the interpreta...
