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The Hebrew Bible promises: "A prophet from your midst, of your brethren, like me, will God establish for you" (Deuteronomy 18:15). Targum Onkelos translates this verse without alte...
...It is written, "The Lord established the earth with wisdom"—this is the Torah. The Torah, where was it and where will it be? Why is it called Torah? Because a teaching descended...
Seventy Names of Metatron: The book "Seventy Names of Metatron", which Rabbi Yishmael revealed, 23 of which he received when he ascended on high. The book was brought to print by R...
..."Let not the rich person glorify themselves with their wealth (Yirm 9:22)." This [refers to] Korach the Levite, who had three hundred mules just to carry the load of the keys to...
Story of Eldad the Danite, Narrative B In the name of the LORD God of Israel, blessed be His name, of our God the King, King of kings, Who chose Israel from among all nations and g...
The Holy One created twenty-two good attributes in His world. All of them were nullified and in the future the Holy One will return them to Israel in the time to come. They are: fo...
The Book of the Wellspring of Wisdom When Moses ascended on high, a cloud came up against him, and Moses our teacher did not know if one rides it or holds it. Immediately, the clou...
Alphabet of Rabbi Akiva (Nusaḥ II) [according to the Krakow and Amsterdam printings] Said Rabbi Aqibha: these are the 22 letters with which the Torah was given to the tribes of Isr...
Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai boarded a ship bound for Rome on a mission to the emperor. That night, on the water, a figure appeared in his dream. It was Ashmedai, king of the demons. "A...
The Aggadah (non-legal rabbinic narrative) of Shimon Kefa preserves a remarkable tradition about how the early Jewish sages worked to establish a clear separation between the Jewis...
Midrash (rabbinic interpretive commentary) Sheni Ketuvim In the beginning God created etc. - To declare the might of the acts of creation to creatures, and to make it known to them...
[From the Sefer Raziel] Rabbi Ishmael said, "I saw the King of Kings sitting on a high and exalted throne, with His legions standing before Him, upon His right and upon His left. (...
These are the ten questions that Rabbi Eliezer asked regarding the resurrection of the dead: The first one is - will God resurrect some of Israel or all of them? The answer is that...
(Ib. b) We are taught: The sages made a fence to their words [to protect their ordinances], lest a man coming from the field in the evening, would say: "I will go home, eat a littl...
R. Elazar b. Abina said : "He who recites Te-hila l' David (Ps. 145) three times a day may be sure of an inheritance in the world to come." What is the reason? Shall I say because ...
We are taught that R. Simon b. Jochai said: "Three precious gifts the Holy One, praised be He! bestowed on Israel, and none of them was bestowed without affliction. The gifts are, ...
Rabbi Yochanan made a promise that sounds almost too good to be true: "Whoever blesses over a full cup is granted an inheritance without boundaries." The teaching, preserved in Ein...
Of all the questions that have haunted the Jewish people across the centuries, none has burned hotter than this one: when will the Messiah come? The Talmud in tractate Sanhedrin (3...
The earliest Hebrews believed the dead descended into Sheol — a colorless underworld where all souls, righteous and wicked alike, lingered in shadow (Isaiah 14:15). Only the rarest...
Gog makes his plans in secret. He thinks his strategies are hidden — the alliance-building, the schemes against Israel, the invasions planned in quiet rooms. "On that day, thoughts...
A psalm of David, written after Doeg the Edomite betrayed him — that's where Aggadat Bereshit anchors the story of Jacob's ladder. Strange placement. But the rabbis had a method. D...
Three figures pray and God delights in it: Moses, David, and the Messiah. This is the claim Aggadat Bereshit makes from (Proverbs 15:8) — "the prayer of the upright is His delight....
"Your right hand, O Lord, is majestic in power" (Exodus 15:6). The rabbis tracked the right hand of God through every book of scripture and found the same pattern everywhere: when ...
"Behold, God will not cast away the perfect, neither will He uphold the evildoers" (Job 8:20). God visited Sarah and she conceived (Genesis 21:1) — after decades of barrenness, aft...
"Until the day breathes and the shadows flee" (Song of Songs 2:17). Israel in exile asks: how long? The kingdoms that rule over them are the shadows — empire after empire, each cas...
When Israel does the will of the Almighty, they rise like ministering angels. This is Aggadat Bereshit's boldest claim about obedience — not that it earns reward, but that it trans...
Esau sees that the women of Canaan displease his father Isaac (Genesis 28:8). So what does he do? He goes and marries a daughter of Ishmael. Adding trouble upon trouble, the rabbis...
When God looks down at a wicked generation, the rabbis said, He searches for one righteous person to carry the weight of atonement for all the rest. This is the reading Aggadat Ber...
Jacob saw the leaders of Esau listed in the Torah — king after king after king (Genesis 36:31-43) — and was afraid. "How can I stand against all of them? I am one man." The Holy On...
The pattern repeats. Israel suffers, God rescues, and Israel sings. Then the singing stops, and the same behavior that caused the original suffering returns. The Holy One watches t...
"Many peoples have afflicted me from my youth" (Psalm 129:1). The Assembly of Israel — the collective voice of the nation — says this as a Song of Ascents, sung while ascending to ...
"Do not be hasty with your words, and let your heart not rush to bring a matter before God" (Ecclesiastes 5:1). Jacob had said: "My way is hidden from the Lord." The rabbis found t...
(Job 5:19) promises: "From six woes He shall save you, and in the seventh, evil shall not reach you." The midrash asks which six woes — and Solomon in Proverbs provides the list: "...
"But Zion said, 'The Lord has forsaken me, the Lord has forgotten me'" (Isaiah 49:14). And God answers — not with proof of presence but with a reminder of what "remembering" actual...
"And the El Shaddai grant you mercy" (Genesis 43:14). Jacob is sending Benjamin to Egypt — his youngest, his only remaining connection to Rachel, the son he can least afford to los...
A small city, few people, a great king who comes and builds fortifications — (Ecclesiastes 9:14) describes something small being threatened by something enormous. The rabbis identi...
"And Jacob called unto his sons" (Genesis 49:1). The Torah records the great final blessing — all twelve sons gathered around the dying patriarch, each receiving something tailored...
"I will assemble Jacob, all of you; I will bring together the remnant of Israel" (Micah 2:12). The end of Aggadat Bereshit's prophetic arc arrives here: not the death of Jacob, not...
The opening verse of Numbers 7 says a single thing twice. Moses "anointed the Tabernacle and sanctified it," and then the verse adds, "and he anointed them and sanctified them." Wh...
At the end of days, the Rabbis of the Talmud (Bava Batra 75a, Pesachim 119b) tell us, the Holy One will set a great banquet for the righteous. The main course will be the flesh of ...
The question hung in the beit midrash: what happened to the ten tribes exiled by Assyria, and will they ever come home? The sages opened (Deuteronomy 29:28) and read: And the Lord ...
The Talmud (Pesachim 119b) pictures the end of days as a banquet. A great cup of wine — two hundred and twenty-one logs, more than a third of a hogshead — will be brought to the ta...
At the foot of Mount Sinai, when Israel answered the Torah with five Hebrew words — na'aseh v'nishma, "we will do and we will hear" (Exodus 24:7) — they did something strange. They...
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...
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...
When Boaz sent Ruth home in the early morning, he poured into her shawl "six measures of barley" (Ruth 3:15). The sages, reading closely, asked: can this really mean six grains, so...
Rabbi Joshua ben Levi had a habit the other sages envied: the prophet Elijah came to him as a companion. The Exempla preserves the memory of one of their walks. Elijah took Rabbi J...
The rabbis of Pirkei de-Rabbi Eliezer chapter 48 imagined the hand of God as a kind of cosmic instrument, each finger doing its own piece of sacred work. With the little finger, th...
