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Rabbi Elazar and Rabbi Yehoshua, two of the sages who witnessed the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE and helped to rebuild Jewish life in the generation that followed, wer...
There was once a pious Jew in one of the villages of late antique Israel who kept a cow to till his fields. Six days a week the cow worked, and on the seventh day she rested. Her m...
A drought gripped the land, and the wells were drying. The Rabbi of the town sat in sackcloth and prayed. Prayer yielded nothing. Then a bat kol, a heavenly voice, came to him with...
Before Abraham was a patriarch he was a shopkeeper's son. His father Terach sold idols in Ur, and Abraham — still a boy — worked behind the counter. The customers came in believing...
The Sages had a quiet problem to solve. The Torah insists that on the seventh day God rested from all the work of creation — yet the world is full of objects that seem to lie outsi...
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, ...
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 ...
Rabbi Akiva was standing on a shore — the Talmud places the scene at the edge of the Mediterranean — when a ship offshore broke apart in a storm. He watched passengers thrown into ...
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 ...
Rabbi Meir left the synagogue one afternoon earlier than usual. His colleagues noticed. Rabbi Meir was not a man who cut services short. When he finally explained himself, the stor...
When Israel came out of Egypt and stood at the shore of the Reed Sea, Samael — the angel who serves as heavenly prosecutor — rose up to accuse them. "Lord of the Universe," Samael ...
Toward the end of his reign, David was asked by the Holy One to choose a punishment for the chain of disasters his decisions had caused — the slaughter of the priestly city of Nob,...
Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai was so great that, during his lifetime, no rainbow ever appeared in the sky over the Land of Israel. The rainbow, in rabbinic tradition, is not only a coven...
Onkelos son of Kalonikos was the nephew of the Roman emperor — by some accounts Hadrian, by others Titus — and one of the great converts to Judaism in the Talmudic age. When Onkelo...
A ship full of travelers was crossing the sea when the wind died. The vessel drifted into still, silent waters and stopped. Each day the becalmed ship sat motionless on a surface l...
Rabbi Meir was walking one day when he overheard something no human being is meant to overhear. A bat kol — a heavenly voice — was giving instructions to a serpent. "Go," the voice...
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 ...
Two men were crossing the desert together, each carrying his own provisions. One of them — the cunning one — proposed that they first eat all the provisions of his companion and sa...
The plague of frogs rose out of the Nile, and the sages wondered: how does a single verse describe it in the singular? And the frog came up and covered the land of Egypt (Exodus 8:...
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...
Jerusalem was dying of thirst. Nakdimon ben Gorion, one of the wealthiest men in the city, made a desperate deal. He borrowed twelve great cisterns' worth of water from a Roman Heg...
Rabbi Janai and Rabbi Johanan sat watching two men leave the study house. They knew something about these men that the men did not know about themselves. Two astrologers had predic...
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. 345, preserves a late medieval legend about Maimonides (1135–1204) surviving a plot against his life. Cruel decrees had gone out against the Jews. Maim...
When Ravah bar Nachmani, one of the giants of the Babylonian academies in the fourth century, died alone in the wilderness, his students searched for him for days without success. ...
Rabbi Levi taught that on the day Solomon carried the Ark into the Temple, something unusual happened to the wood. The beams of cedar that lined the walls and the ceilings, long si...
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 ...
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,...
A man named Yochanan sat at the bedside of his dying father. The father made one strange request. "When I am gone, go to the marketplace on a day you choose, and whatever is the fi...
Pinhas ben Yair was a second-century rabbi remembered for an unnerving combination of piety and practical wisdom. He was the son-in-law of Rabbi Shimon ben Yochai, and stories abou...
In one Jewish town, the leaders of the community had developed a custom of carrying a Torah scroll with them when they went to meet the king on ceremonial visits. The Torah in its ...
A group of children in a Jewish village were playing on Shabbat. As the sun rose higher over the day of rest, they wandered too close to the edge of an old well and fell in. The we...
A pious man in a certain town gave charity every day to the poor. The townspeople hated him for it. They passed a decree that anyone who gave charity would be cast into the sea or ...
On the day Isaac was weaned, Abraham threw open his tents and invited every household in the land. It was meant as a celebration, but rumor crawled in with the guests. Whispers pas...
King Solomon needed the Shamir, a creature no larger than a barley grain but strong enough to split any stone, because the Torah forbade iron tools on the Temple's stones. To find ...
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...
The sages were debating whether a certain oven, built in sections and joined with sand, could become ritually unclean. Rabbi Eliezer ruled it pure. The majority ruled it impure. He...
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 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...
There was a man called Yosef Mokir Shabbat, "Yosef the Honorer of the Sabbath." Every Friday he spent whatever he had on the best food available for the Shabbat table. Anything the...
Ben Sabar was a man famous for his tzedakah. When word came that a poor couple in a distant town needed money for their wedding, he packed a sack of coin and set out without hesita...
Rabbi Akiva had a pious first wife who fed and housed his five hundred students for years. On her deathbed she asked her daughter to continue the work. The daughter accepted the tr...
A beggar once came to Rava's door asking for a meal. The story is told in tractate Ketubot (folio 67, column 2), and it is really about the difference between charity as surveillan...
Tractate Shabbat (folio 66, column 2) preserves something most modern readers will find startling: a rabbinic prescription against fever that is half incantation, half midrash. The...
The Sefer HaMa'asiyot — the Book of Exempla — compiled by Moses Gaster in 1924 from medieval Jewish manuscripts, preserves a short and sharp story about the daughter of a Roman emp...
Mar Ukva, a fourth-century Babylonian sage and exilarch, was famous for his habit of secret charity. Every day he would pass by a certain poor man's house and drop a small purse of...
It was prophesied to Rabbi Akiva that his beloved daughter would die on the day of her wedding. Akiva was a student of signs and omens; he believed the prediction. But he also beli...
Gaster's exemplum No. 438, drawn from the Gaster Hebrew manuscripts, tells the story of a stubborn merchant who decided to prove that a person can lose his property any time he wan...
