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A small boy was traveling in a boat along the coast when the prophet Elijah appeared to him. Elijah was famous for wandering the world in disguise, testing Jews, delivering message...
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...
Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai, the sage who rescued Torah study from the ashes of Jerusalem's destruction in 70 CE by founding the academy at Yavneh, once taught that in the future, wh...
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 Sages of the Talmud were obsessed with the question of when the Mashiach would come — and fiercely allergic to anyone who tried to nail it to a date. Sanhedrin 97 preserves bot...
A pious man was walking along the shore of Haifa, the harbor city on the Mediterranean coast of the Galilee. As he walked he was thinking about a rabbinic tradition — a well-known ...
Elijah was a regular visitor at Rabbi's academy. He would slip in quietly, take his seat, and listen. One first-of-the-month he came in late, and Rabbi asked him what had kept him....
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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 ...
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...
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...
The Kabbalists — the sages of truth, as the tradition calls them — noticed something about the Hebrew letters of Adam. The word אדם spells three names. Aleph for Adam. Dalet for Da...
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...
Here the Targumist drops a myth into the middle of the verse. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 1:21) says the Lord created the great tanninim — sea dragons — and among them Levia...
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....
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...
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...
(Genesis 19:37), in Targum Pseudo-Jonathan: "And the elder brought forth a son, and she called his name Moab, because from her father she had conceived. He is the father of the Moa...
The fourth son is Judah, from the root hoda'ah, "thanksgiving" (Genesis 29:35). Leah speaks one of the most remarkable lines in the entire matriarchal record: This time will I give...
"I will lead on quietly alone, according to the foot of the work which is before me, and according to the foot of the instruction of the children; until the time that I come to my ...
After burying Rachel on the road to Ephrath, Jacob kept walking. He pitched his tent in a quiet, unremarkable place — Migdal Eder, the Tower of the Flock, a shepherd's watchtower o...
Genesis 38 opens with a strange, almost intrusive line: and Judah went down from his brothers. The Torah does not explain. The story of Joseph is unfolding dramatically, and sudden...
When Er died, the custom of yibbum — levirate marriage — required his brother Onan to marry Tamar and father a child who would legally carry Er's name and inherit Er's portion. The...
After losing two sons, Judah faced a choice. The custom required his third and last surviving son, Shelah, to marry Tamar and try to raise up the line. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (G...
The second twin pushes his way out ahead of the first, and Tamar — or, in some readings, the midwife — speaks words that the Targum Pseudo-Jonathan hears as prophecy. With what gre...
Judah steps up with the reminder. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 43:3) records his words to Jacob: "The man attesting attested to us saying, You shall not see the sight of my f...
Judah does not haggle with his father. He does something stranger. He offers a guarantee so total that it extends beyond time itself. "I will be surety for him," he says. "Of my ha...
The speech closes where it began. Judah returns, at the end, to the same pledge he gave his father at the beginning of the story, and makes it explicit. "Therefore thy servant beca...
The name Judah (Yehudah) comes from the Hebrew root y-d-h — to acknowledge, to confess, to praise. Jacob knows this, and Targum Pseudo-Jonathan will not let the wordplay pass unuse...
Jacob compares Judah to a lion's cub, and Targum Pseudo-Jonathan explains exactly why. Two moments made Judah roar. "From the killing of Joseph my son thou didst uplift thy soul, a...
(Genesis 49:10) is the verse that launched a thousand Jewish hopes. The Hebrew is cryptic: "The scepter shall not depart from Judah... until Shiloh come." Targum Pseudo-Jonathan wi...
The Targum Pseudo-Jonathan does not describe a gentle Messiah. It describes a warrior king who ends the reign of tyrants. "How beauteous is the King, the Meshiha who will arise fro...
The Targum has shown the Messiah as warrior. Now it shows him as judge, and the portrait turns tender. "How beautiful are the eyes of the king Meshiha, as the pure wine! He cannot ...
After prophesying Samson's rise, Jacob pauses. The next verse in Genesis 49 is almost a sigh. "For Thy salvation have I waited, O Lord." Targum Pseudo-Jonathan unpacks the grief an...
There will be false redeemers. Joseph knows this. Before he closes his eyes, he hands his children a test. The Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on Genesis (50:25) expands his oath dramatical...
Among the quietest bombshells in Targum Pseudo-Jonathan is a single line tucked into a genealogy. Kehath, son of Levi, lived a hundred and thirty-three years, and, the Targum adds,...
Of all the expansions in Targum Pseudo-Jonathan, few are as beautiful as the Four Nights passage on (Exodus 12:42). The Aramaic says there are four nights written in the Book of Me...
(Exodus 15:18) in the Hebrew is a single line: The Lord shall reign forever and ever. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan expands it into a full coronation ceremony. When Israel beheld the sign...
Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Exodus 16:32) gives us one of the great commandments of Israel's memory: a jar of manna, set aside and preserved, so that later, less fortunate generatio...
The Targum Pseudo-Jonathan closes the Amalek story with one of the most extraordinary vows in the Torah. "Because the Word of the Lord hath sworn by the throne of His glory, that H...
Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on Exodus (Exodus 23:31) maps Israel's inheritance: I will set thy boundary from the sea of Suph, to the sea of the Philistaee, and from the desert unto the ...
Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Exodus 40:9) takes a small detail — anointing the tabernacle with the consecration oil — and reaches forward across centuries. Anoint the tent and everyt...
Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Exodus 40:10) takes the consecration of the altar of burnt offering and turns it into a prophecy. Anoint the altar, the meturgeman says, on account of th...
Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Exodus 40:11) turns the consecration of the bronze laver into a vision of the distant future. Anoint the laver, the meturgeman says, on account of Jehosh...
