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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 Yochanan once taught that the royal mount of King Yannai (the Hasmonean Alexander Jannaeus, who reigned 103 to 76 BCE) contained sixty myriads of cities. Each city held a pop...
Isaiah writes, For My own sake, for My own sake will I do it (Isaiah 48:11). Why the repetition? Why does God say for My own sake twice? The midrash on this verse, preserved in Mid...
Twice in the Hellenistic era the Torah crossed the language barrier into Greek, and the Rabbis remembered the two events very differently. Both are recorded in exemplum 61 of Moses...
At a banquet in the academy of Rabbi Yehuda HaNasi, the great redactor of the Mishnah around 200 CE, the wine flowed a little too freely. The sons of Rabbi Chiya, two brothers of s...
The Talmud preserves a strange tradition about how Rome came to be. When Solomon married the daughter of Pharaoh — a politically brilliant match that would one day haunt the house ...
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...
Three Sages sat together — Rabbi Yehudah, Rabbi Yossi, and Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai — and Rabbi Yehudah remarked how impressive the Romans were: they had built markets, bathhouses, ...
At the very end of Genesis, Joseph — viceroy of Egypt, the savior of the known world during the famine — calls his brothers to his deathbed. Instead of dispensing political advice ...
Rabbi Isaac noticed something in the book of Eicha, the Lamentations read on the Ninth of Av every year. "Her children are gone into captivity before the enemy" (Lamentations 1:5)....
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...
Rabbi Shimon ben Gamliel, quoting Rabbi Yehoshua, said something that should stop us: since the destruction of the Temple, not a single day has passed without a curse (Sotah 48a). ...
When blind Isaac reached out to bless his son and said, "HaKol kol Yaakov v'ha-yadayim y'dei Esav" — "The voice is the voice of Jacob, but the hands are the hands of Esau" (Genesis...
Rabbi Levi told a parable that holds three prophets in one sentence. Israel, he said, is like a noblewoman who had three friends. One knew her in her prosperity. One knew her in he...
Four rabbis were walking together on Mount Scopus, looking down at the ruin of Jerusalem. They saw a fox running out of the Holy of Holies. The three older sages began to weep. Rab...
In the days of Maimonides — Rabbi Moshe ben Maimon, 1138-1204 CE — evil decrees were issued against the Jews of his city. The laws were designed to humiliate. If a gentile were so ...
The story picks up after Ashmedai, king of the demons, has seized Solomon's magical ring and flung it into the sea. Power stripped, Solomon is no longer Solomon. The demon king hur...
Gittin 57b tells a story that Jewish liturgy still refuses to round off. Four hundred boys and four hundred girls were once kidnapped from their families by Roman captors. As the s...
Sanhedrin 91a preserves a courtroom drama from the age of Alexander of Macedon. The people of Egypt appeared before the conqueror to lodge a complaint against Israel. Their argumen...
Jewish folk belief about small coins ran deep in the towns of Poland. Among both Jewish and Gentile neighbors a superstition held that a penny found at the right moment — stumbled ...
When Rome decreed death for Jews who taught Torah, Rabbi Shimon ben Yohai and his son fled into a cave. They stayed there thirteen years. A carob tree sprang up at the mouth of the...
Gaster's Exempla (1924), No. 240, preserves a story that the Talmud tells at length in Makkot 24b. Rabbi Akiva was traveling with colleagues when they came within sight of Rome. Th...
Bar Kappara was walking along the seashore when he saw a naked man washed up in the tide. The man was called an Antipatos — a title of rank in the imperial bureaucracy — and he had...
Rome had issued three decrees against the Jews. They were forbidden to keep the Sabbath, forbidden to circumcise their sons, and forbidden to observe the laws of family purity. The...
Jerusalem was under siege. Day after day, the defenders inside the city lowered a basket of silver over the walls, and the besiegers below filled the basket with a lamb, a kid, or ...
Someone once asked Rabbi Akiba how it could be that King Hezekiah, the righteous teacher of Torah, had raised a son as wicked as Manasseh. "Twelve years old was Manasseh when he be...
The sins of Israel had grown too heavy for the patience of the Holy One. The prophet Jeremiah had warned for decades and had been ignored, mocked, thrown into a pit. A time came wh...
The emperor of Rome once put a mocking question to Rabbi Yehoshua ben Hananyah. "Why is your God compared to a lion? Any knight in my army can kill a lion. What kind of comparison ...
Two men in the Babylonian exile claimed to prophesy in the name of the Lord. Their names were Ahab ben Kolayah and Zidkiah ben Ma'aseyah. Their false oracles are mentioned with dis...
During a season of Roman persecution, two disciples of Rabbi Yehoshua ben Chananyah disguised themselves in Gentile dress and tried to pass unnoticed through dangerous territory. T...
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,...
Two astrologers were sent on a delegation to Rabbi Gamliel in the town of Usha. Their mission was to study Jewish law from its source, to examine it in detail, and to report back t...
Caesar once said to Rabbi Tanchum, "Come, let us become one people." The rabbi answered calmly. "Very well. But we are circumcised, and we cannot simply become as you are. If, howe...
Midrash Rabbah on Deuteronomy preserves a strange detail about the fall of the First Temple. When the Babylonian conquerors carried away the holy vessels, they did not carry away t...
Scripture says that Jacob's family went down to Egypt numbering seventy souls (Genesis 46:27). When the sages sat down to count the names listed in the chapter, they reached only s...
When Esau came back from the hunt and saw that Jacob had taken the blessing, he plotted his revenge quietly. The sages, reading the reunion years later in Genesis 33, noticed that ...
Before he launched his final assault on Judah, Nebuchadnezzar paused to consult the omens. He was a king of his age, and the practice of his age was belomancy, divination by arrows...
A Roman governor once made the acquaintance of the prophet Elijah. The meeting changed him. Elijah persuaded him to take the huge wealth he had amassed in office and, instead of sq...
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...
The midrashic retelling of the destruction of the First Temple in 586 BCE preserves an image that belongs to nightmares. The high priest stood in the burning courts of the Beit HaM...
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, ...
On the twenty-eighth of Adar the Jewish community received word that the Roman government had passed a cruel decree: Jews were forbidden to study Torah, to circumcise their sons, o...
A Roman legend told how the daughter of a certain emperor had so admired the beauty of Rabbi Ishmael's face that after his martyrdom his skin was removed, embalmed, and kept among ...
When Nebuchadnezzar led Israel into the Babylonian captivity, he demanded that the Levites — the Temple singers — perform the Songs of Zion for his court. The Levites had spent the...
After the Bar Kokhba revolt the Roman Empire passed a decree that struck at the heart of Jewish continuity: any sage who ordained a student to the rank of rabbi, and any student wh...
Somewhere beyond the known world, the sages said, there runs a river that refuses to behave like a river. It is called the Sambatyon, and it does not flow with water. It rushes wit...
Rabbi Yehudah HaNasi — known simply as Rabbi, the Holy One, the redactor of the Mishnah — sat one evening at his table with two of his youngest guests: Yehudah and Chiskiyah, the s...
Four rabbis were on the road to Rome. Rabban Gamliel, Rabbi Elazar ben Azariah, Rabbi Yehoshua, and Rabbi Akiva traveled together, and while they were still one hundred and twenty ...
