3,491 texts · Page 43 of 73
The prophet Isaiah met King Hezekiah outside Jerusalem. The meeting was not a diplomatic visit. Isaiah carried a message from God: Hezekiah's children would do evil. Hezekiah did n...
The First Temple, the sages taught, held five tokens of God's nearness that the Second Temple lacked: the Ark and its cover, the sacred fire that came down from heaven, the Shekhin...
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...
The sages taught that forty years before the Second Temple burned, its destruction had already begun to show in the quiet details only the priests could read. On Yom Kippur, the lo...
No one in Israel, the sages taught, could humble himself more thoroughly than David when a commandment was at stake. Before God he spoke the words of Psalm 131, and the midrash tea...
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...
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...
On the ninth of Av, the blackest day on the Jewish calendar, the normal pleasures drop away one by one. No eating. No drinking. No anointing with oil. No leather shoes on the feet....
Hiram, king of Tyre, the Phoenician ruler who had once sent cedar and skilled craftsmen to his friend Solomon (1 Kings 5:1), grew so rich that he tried to build heaven for himself....
King Hezekiah of Judah lay dying. The prophet Isaiah came to his bedside with what should have been the last message: set your house in order, for you shall die (2 Kings 20:1). Hez...
When Noah released a bird to test whether the floodwaters had receded, the Torah tells us he sent out a raven (Genesis 8:7). The midrash on this verse imagines an argument breaking...
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...
A heathen once pressed Rabban Gamliel with a question he thought would trip up the Rabbi. Why, he asked, did the God of Israel reveal Himself to Moses out of a bush? There are ceda...
For seven years after the destruction of the First Temple, the Sages say, the nations of the world cultivated their vineyards with no other manure than the blood of Israel. The soi...
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...
Rabbi Yehoshua, the son of Korcha, heard the story from an old man of Jerusalem who had lived through the Babylonian destruction. In the valley below the city, Nebuzaradan — captai...
A philosopher once came to Rabbi Eliezer with what he thought was an airtight argument against Jewish prophecy. He cited (Malachi 1:4), where God says of Edom, "They shall build, b...
The prophet Elijah was traveling through the world with a disciple — the kind of journey the Sages often assigned Elijah in their stories, testing whether his disciple could see th...
Rabbi Yossi gave a teaching that startles the ear. The Shechinah, he said, has never descended below, and Moses and Elijah never truly ascended on high. Heaven and earth keep a sma...
A Sadducee came to Rabbi Abahu with a sharp question. "You rabbis teach," he said, "that the souls of the righteous are treasured up beneath the Throne of Glory. If that is so, how...
Rabbi Levi told a parable that holds three prophets in one sentence. Israel, he said, is like a noblewoman who had three friends. One knew her in her prosperity. One knew her in he...
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...
Samuel the prophet once stood at the bank of a river and watched a strange sight. A frog was swimming across the water with a scorpion riding on its back. The scorpion could not sw...
Scripture says of Samson that "the spirit of the Lord began to move him at times in the camp of Dan, between Zoreah and Eshtaol" (Judges 13:25). The rabbis reading that verse pause...
Someone once asked Rabbi Akiba how it could be that King Hezekiah, the righteous teacher of Torah, had raised a son as wicked as Manasseh. "Twelve years old was Manasseh when he be...
The sins of Israel had grown too heavy for the patience of the Holy One. The prophet Jeremiah had warned for decades and had been ignored, mocked, thrown into a pit. A time came wh...
Two men in the Babylonian exile claimed to prophesy in the name of the Lord. Their names were Ahab ben Kolayah and Zidkiah ben Ma'aseyah. Their false oracles are mentioned with dis...
Elijah the prophet and Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi traveled together for a time, and Elijah agreed to be his companion on one condition: the rabbi must ask no questions. Rabbi Yehoshua...
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...
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...
When Rabbi Eliezer ben Hyrcanus, called the Great, lay dying, he gathered his students for a last round of teachings that has the quality of prophecy more than of instruction. He l...
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...
Rabbi Abhu once said, "Were it not for this Scripture text, it would be impossible to repeat what is written." He meant the verse in Isaiah: "On that day the Lord shall shave with ...
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 verse in (1 Kings 4:30) tells us that Solomon's wisdom exceeded the wisdom of all the east and all of Egypt. The midrash on Kings, preserved in Yalkut Eliezer, offers a story t...
The midrashic retelling of the destruction of the First Temple in 586 BCE preserves an image that belongs to nightmares. The high priest stood in the burning courts of the Beit HaM...
Gaster's exemplum No. 273 preserves two short Talmudic stories about how seriously the sages took small signs. In the first, Rav — the third-century Babylonian sage who founded the...
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 ...
A Roman emperor challenged a sage about the verse in Amos (3:8): The lion hath roared, who will not fear? "Where is this excellence?" the emperor scoffed. "A single horseman kills ...
When Sennacherib the Assyrian emperor came against Jerusalem, his pride was as tall as his army. The midrash tells how God humbled him in a sequence of ordinary-seeming errands. Fi...
The sages defended Rav Saphra for his devotion to Oral Torah over Scripture, and in doing so they staked out one of Judaism's most startling claims. Tradition, they argued, is not ...
When Nero first entered the Holy Land, he did not arrive as a conqueror sure of his victory. He arrived as a diviner uncertain of his fate. He took up his bow and shot an arrow eas...
King Solomon and King Hiram of Tyre once marched their armies to opposite banks of a river. Tension rose. Solomon, worried his soldiers would collapse in the sun, summoned birds to...
The Talmud in Maccoth preserves a remarkable teaching: Moses pronounced four severe judgments over Israel, and four later prophets rose up and softened them. This is not rebellion....
The midrash tells of the last days of Jerusalem under Roman siege. One of the wealthiest women of the city, Miriam the daughter of Baythus, sent her servant to buy flour for the ho...
Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 5:29) preserves the folk etymology of Noah's name. Lamech calls his son "Noach," which the Targum glosses as "Consolation," saying: "This shall c...
The Torah's "his days shall be 120 years" gets a full theological frame in Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 6:3). God speaks by His Word: "All the generations of the wicked which...
