4,035 texts · Page 48 of 85
Rabbi Yohanan ben Matya instructed his son one morning to go out and make sure the Jewish workers hired for the day were fed well. "Feed them adequately," he said. "Do not cut corn...
"And it came to pass, when Abram was come into Egypt" (Genesis 12:14). So the verse tells us, matter-of-factly. But where was Sarah? The midrash fills the silence. Abraham, knowing...
The Torah tells the encounter briefly: Potiphar's wife caught Joseph by his cloak, and he fled. The midrash, unwilling to leave so fierce a struggle so thinly described, puts Psalm...
Abraham stepped out of the cave where he had been hidden as an infant, and for the first time saw the world above ground. He looked up and saw the sun climbing, enormous and warm, ...
When Nimrod the wicked cast Abraham into the fiery furnace for smashing his father's idols, the angel Gabriel stepped forward in the heavenly court. Ribbono shel Olam, Master of th...
Why, the rabbis ask, did Abraham only now, at the border of Egypt, realize that Sarah was beautiful? Had he never noticed before? One reading of (Genesis 12:11) goes like this. Abr...
When Abraham came to the cave of Machpelah to bury Sarah, he did not find the cave empty. According to the Yalkut Chadash, the first couple was already there, and they were not ple...
Rabbi Yochanan bar Nappacha, the great third-century amora of Tiberias, was famous among his contemporaries for two things. He was one of the most brilliant legal minds of his gene...
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...
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 ...
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....
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 Eleazar said that the month of Tishri holds more Jewish history than any other. "Abraham and Jacob were born in Tishri," he taught, "and in Tishri they died. On the first of ...
In the days when Alexander the Great marched through Asia, the Ishmaelites came before him with a lawsuit. They claimed Canaan. They were descended from Abraham, they argued; the I...
And it came to pass after these things that God tested Abraham (Genesis 22:1). Rabbi Yochanan, speaking in the name of Rabbi Yossi ben Zimra, asks in Sanhedrin 89b: after what thin...
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...
Rabbi Hoshaya ben Levi discovered a numerical poem in an old Aggadah book. Gaster's Exempla (1924), No. 285, preserves it in four lines. The Torah contains one hundred seventy-five...
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...
After Abraham had sent his son Ishmael away to live with his mother Hagar, Ishmael settled in the wilderness and married a Moabite wife. Years passed. Abraham wanted to see how his...
A Roman noblewoman, a matrona, came to Rabbi Yose ben Halafta with a question. She had been reading the book of Genesis, and she was curious about the birth of Rebecca's twins. "Wh...
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...
The sages taught that four things cancel an evil decree sealed in Heaven, and they built each proof from Scripture itself. The first is tzedakah, the righteous gift. "Righteousness...
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...
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...
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 ...
A traditional prayer of personal return, drawn from the anthologies of Jewish rabbinical writings, places the worshiper on his knees before the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. "E...
Sarah, Rebecca, and Rachel all went through seasons of barrenness before they bore children, even though each was promised a great nation through her womb. The sages asked why the ...
Tractate Gittin (folio 57, column 2) preserves one of the most devastating martyrdom stories in all of rabbinic literature — a Jewish mother and her seven sons dragged before a Rom...
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. ...
A Kuthean — a Samaritan — once came to Rabbi Meir with an accusation against the patriarch Jacob. It is preserved as exemplum No. 32 in Moses Gaster's 1924 collection. "Your ancest...
Abraham stands at the headwaters of the Jewish story, and the Talmud gathers around him a flood of legends — score upon score of traditions that stretch far beyond what the Book of...
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 ...
Shechem son of Hamor once assembled a troupe of girls with tambourines to play outside the tent of Dinah, and when she "went out to see them" (Genesis 34:1), he carried her off. Fr...
The sages taught that on the day of judgment, every soul will be asked why it did not devote itself to Torah. Three common excuses will be raised — poverty, wealth, and youth — and...
Rabbi Abraham of Ashkelon was known in his city for the regularity of his prayers. He never missed the appointed hours; his Shacharit, Minchah, and Maariv were as steady as the sun...
When Abraham left Ur Kasdim and the idol-shops of his father Terach, he did not simply walk away. He pitched a tent, and the tent became a doorway. The rabbis imagined the scene th...
The moment when Joseph's brothers recognized him in the palace at Memphis was, according to the midrash, more violent than the Torah lets on. Some of the brothers, the sages said, ...
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...
The Samaritans of late antiquity insisted they were descendants of Joseph through the northern tribes of Ephraim and Manasseh. It was a matter of pride. Rabbi Meir disagreed. Meir ...
The Talmud in Nedarim asks an uncomfortable question: why did the children of Abraham, the father of faith, endure two hundred and ten years of Egyptian bondage? What did Abraham, ...
Bamidbar Rabbah preserves a tender moment in the imagined inner life of the Holy One. When God decided to bless Abraham, He paused. “What shall I tell him?” the Holy On...
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...
The Torah tells the story quickly — too quickly, the rabbis felt. Dinah, the daughter of Jacob and Leah, was taken and violated by Shechem, the prince of the local city. Her ...
Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 5:3) reopens old wounds. "Adam lived a hundred and thirty years, and begat Sheth, who had the likeness of his image and of his similitude: for be...
The Hebrew Bible says simply that Haran died before his father Terah in the land of his birth (Genesis 11:28). One quiet sentence. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan opens that sentence like a...
