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Gaster's Exempla of the Rabbis (1924), preserved from the Ma'aseh Book, tells a courtroom tale set in the court of Alexander. The people of Afriki — the descendants of Canaan who h...
The rabbis of the Talmud were connoisseurs of soil. They compared regions by fertility the way others compare wines. The best land in the world, they said, is Egypt, for it is writ...
When Moses blessed the tribe of Asher at the end of his life, he said, "Let him dip his foot in oil" (Deuteronomy 33:24). The rabbis of the Talmud took the blessing literally. Ashe...
In the Temple service, everyone bowed thirteen times, corresponding to the thirteen shofar-shaped collection boxes and the thirteen tables arrayed in the sanctuary. Yet those who b...
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...
The sages loved to measure the enemies of Israel, because their sheer size made the victory more astonishing. When Sennacherib the Assyrian invaded Judah, he came with forty-five t...
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...
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...
There was once a farmer who paid his tithes with scrupulous care. Every year, on the appointed seasons, he set aside the priestly portion, the Levitical tenth, and the poor-tithe, ...
The midrash on Abraham's hospitality in Genesis 18 notices something small and opens it into a whole theology. The patriarch had just made a covenant with the peoples of the land. ...
Devarim Rabbah (chapter 4) preserves a comment of Rabbi Yitzchak on the verse, "When the Lord your God shall enlarge your border, as He has promised you" (Deuteronomy 12:20). It is...
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, ...
The prophet Isaiah promised a strange future (Isaiah 66:23): It shall come to pass that from one new moon to another, and from one Sabbath to another, shall all flesh come to worsh...
A later midrashic legend reimagines Joab, the great general of King David, on one of his hardest campaigns. He had been hurled by the Israelites into a city called Kinsari, a forti...
There is a moment in Chullin 90b where Rava calls out his fellow rabbi for exaggeration. The Mishnah had just described the heap of ashes that accumulated on the Temple altar — som...
A tradition delivered at Sinai remembers the day Og, king of Bashan, nearly crushed the camp of Israel under a single stone. Og stood above the valley and measured the camp with hi...
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 Moses sent twelve spies into the land of Canaan, the legend of the Rabbis remembers that the land was inhabited by giants — not merely tall men but beings of such scale that a...
There is a tradition that King Hezekiah hid away a Sefer Refuot, a Book of Remedies, containing cures for nearly every disease. To modern ears this sounds cruel — why withhol...
The rabbis taught that Jerusalem was not like other cities. Ten laws applied to her alone, each one a small clue to her strange status. A mortgaged house there was never permanentl...
When Israel went up to Jerusalem for one of the three pilgrimage festivals (Exodus 34:23-24), a season came in which the wells ran dry. There was no water for the pilgrims to drink...
Rabbi Yochanan was teaching his students on the verse, “I will make thy windows of agates, and thy gates of carbuncles” (Isaiah 54:12). He said, “The Holy One, bl...
The rabbis read the Torah with a quiet attention to who shows up at whose door. They noticed that wherever a righteous person travels, blessing travels with them, like a shadow tha...
The rabbis noticed a quiet escalation in the promises made to the patriarchs about the land. To Abraham, God said, “Arise, walk through the land in the length of it and in th...
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 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...
Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 8:4) plants the ark on a very specific patch of earth. In the seventh month, on the seventeenth day, in the month the Targum calls Nisan, the gre...
Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 8:11) takes a verse every child knows and slips a piece of mystical geography into it. The dove returns at evening. She carries a fresh-plucked o...
This is one of those verses where Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 8:20) opens a hidden corridor through the whole Torah. The Hebrew simply says Noah built an altar. The Aramaic ...
Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 8:22) anchors the new covenant in something every farmer and every child understands. Sowing in the season of Tishri, and harvest in the season o...
The journey that will become the spine of the Hebrew Bible begins not with Abram but with his father. In (Genesis 11:31) Terah takes his son, his grandson Lot, and his daughter-in-...
The most famous call in the Hebrew Bible lands on Abram's ear as a single imperative in (Genesis 12:1): Go forth. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan slows the verse down and makes you feel eac...
The verse is almost administrative. Abram leaves Haran at seventy-five. Lot goes with him. The Targum in (Genesis 12:4) does not embroider — and that restraint is the whole lesson....
The Hebrew of (Genesis 12:5) uses a strange phrase: the souls they had made in Haran. How does one make a soul? Targum Pseudo-Jonathan answers in a single word that opens a whole t...
The first place Abram stops in the land of promise is Shechem. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 12:6) preserves a sobering detail that the Hebrew Bible states simply and the Targ...
In (Genesis 12:7) the covenant becomes architectural. The Lord appears to Abram, says To thy sons will I give this land, and Abram answers with stones. He builds an altar. Targum P...
Abram pitches his tent on a mountain east of Bethel, Ai on the other side, and the moment in (Genesis 12:8) almost passes without incident. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan catches the one d...
The verse is a hinge the Hebrew Bible almost hides. After the humiliation of Egypt, after Pharaoh hands Sarah back and sends the family away, (Genesis 13:3) tells us that Abram ret...
The Hebrew Bible in (Genesis 13:7) says only that there was strife between the shepherds. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan tells you what the strife was about, and the answer is an ethics le...
The Hebrew Bible in (Genesis 13:14) times the divine address with surgical precision: after that Lot had separated from him. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan preserves the clause verbatim be...
The promise in (Genesis 13:16) has a strange choice of image. God does not tell Abram his children will be like stars or like sand. Those images come later. Here the promise is as ...
The verse in (Genesis 13:18) is the closing note of a long chapter. Abram pulls up his tent, moves south, and pitches it in the vale of Mamre at Hebron. He builds an altar. Targum ...
A geographical footnote in (Genesis 14:3) becomes, in Targum Pseudo-Jonathan, a small elegy. The Aramaic renders the location as the vale of the gardens (paredesaia), the place tha...
Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 14:5) turns a military roll call into a tour of the archaic world's titans. Kedarlaomer's coalition sweeps through the land and smites three peop...
Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 14:6) adds a single parenthetical that rewrites a whole people's identity: the Choraee (dwellers in caverns) who were in the high mountains of Ge...
A military march in (Genesis 14:7) becomes, in Targum Pseudo-Jonathan, a moment of temporal vertigo. The verse says the kings returned to En-Mishpat, meaning the spring of judgment...
The verse in (Genesis 14:8) simply lists who showed up for the battle. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan cannot let a list stay a list. It glosses Bela once more as the city which consumed it...
Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 14:9) makes a small geographical translation that reframes the entire conflict. The Hebrew Bible names four kings: Kedarlaomer of Elam, Tidal, Am...
