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The Torah says something strange when Balaam, the prophet hired by Balak of Moab to curse Israel, finally opened his mouth. And the Lord put a word in Balaam's mouth (Numbers 23:5)...
Scattered through the old anthologies is a trove of one-line sayings — proverbs the Rabbis handed down the way other peoples pass down songs. The 1901 collection Hebraic Literature...
A ma'aseh preserved in the Gaster manuscripts, and recorded as exemplum no. 308 in Moses Gaster's 1924 The Exempla of the Rabbis, tells of a man who made a single vow early in his ...
A young man traveling through the country met a young woman, and they fell in love. When he had to leave her town, they swore to wait for each other until they could marry. "Who wi...
A woman came to Rabbi Eliezer with a dream. She described what she had seen in the night. Rabbi Eliezer listened carefully and said: "You will bear a male child." In time, the woma...
A man in a certain town buried a sum of money in his garden for safekeeping. He thought no one had seen. He was wrong. His neighbor, watching through a gap in the wall, waited a da...
The twelfth blessing of the Amidah, the eighteen benedictions prayed three times daily, is known by its opening Hebrew word V'lamalshinim — "and for the slanderers." Its language i...
The sages counted two hundred and forty-eight limbs in the human body — the same number, they noted, as the positive commandments of the Torah. A curse, they taught, enters and exi...
The anthologists of the old Hebraic literature gathered Talmudic aphorisms the way a peddler gathers buttons — many small, each perfect. A handful: The rivalry of scholars advances...
A man from the Galilee once traveled to Jerusalem for the three festival pilgrimages. On his way home, rather than carry all his coin across the dangerous roads, he entrusted two h...
The rabbis of the Talmud and midrash did not only tell stories. They minted aphorisms, tight as coins, that still circulate in Jewish conversation two millennia later. Here are a d...
A man had entrusted a sum of money to a neighbor, Bar Temalian, for safekeeping. When he came back to collect it, Bar Temalian lied to his face and said, I never received any money...
Rabbi Yochanan, speaking in the name of Yossi the son of Zimra, asked about a verse that the eye passes over too quickly. What shall be given unto thee, or what shall be added unto...
A difficult case came before the elders. A young man was suspected of illegitimate birth, and the Rabbis disagreed about his status. Rabbi Yehoshua ruled that he was a ben niddah, ...
The Talmud and midrashim collected thousands of pithy sayings, the pitgamim that teachers would fire off at students to make a point stick. Here is a short bouquet, preserved in Ha...
Two women lived as close friends in one of the towns of late antique Israel. One day one of them was kneading dough at her neighbor's house, and a gold dinar slipped out of her pur...
Beruriah, the brilliant second-century sage who was the daughter of the martyr Rabbi Chananiah ben Teradyon and the wife of Rabbi Meir, is one of the few women whose Torah opinions...
Rabbi Yochanan was suffering from scurvy — a miserable, bleeding affliction of the gums — and the standard remedies were not helping. In desperation he went to a woman skilled in f...
The Talmud preserves floating aphorisms — lines remembered without the stories they once belonged to, collected into strings that read like the Jewish equivalent of a commonplace b...
A Roman matrona — a high-ranking noblewoman, the kind who watched the Jewish sages with mingled suspicion and curiosity — once accosted Rabbi Yehudah ben Ilai on the street.She loo...
A poor person came to a woman's door and gave her a dinar — a silver coin — to hold for safekeeping. She took it and, with characteristic absentmindedness, set it down near the flo...
Rabbi Rabina, a fifth-century Babylonian Sage, once learned from Rabbi Tabut (also called Tabyome) that there was a place on earth where truth was not an ethical preference but a l...
Ravina once sighed, "There is no truth left in the world." Rabbi Toviah would not let the statement stand. "If all the riches of the world were offered me," he would say, "I would ...
When the waters of the flood began to rise and every living thing scrambled toward the ark, a strange creature came to Noah's gate — the Lie. The Lie asked to be admitted. Noah loo...
Rumor reached the sages that Rabbi Shimon ben Antipatros was in the habit of beating his dinner guests. Beating them. Not turning them away at the door, not refusing them a second ...
Rabbi Shimon ben Halafta was invited to a brit milah — the circumcision of an eight-day-old child. He arrived, sat with the family, recited the blessings. The child was ill, gravel...
A gentile once lent a sum of money to a Jew. They had no written contract, but they swore their agreement beneath a great tree in the countryside, calling on the Holy One and on th...
A man left a dinar — a single silver coin — with a woman for safekeeping. She didn't want to forget where she had put it. She dropped it into a jar of flour and went about her day....
The Rabbis taught, in Chullin 94a, a cluster of warnings about the small deceptions that undo a household. None is dramatic. Each is deadly.The shoe. Do not sell a neighbor shoes m...
The Talmud preserves a strange journey. Benaiah son of Jehoiada has captured Ashmedai, the king of the demons, and leads him bound toward Solomon's court. Along the road, the demon...
Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi made a grand claim in Berakhot 19a: "The tribunal excommunicates for the honor of a Rabbi in twenty-four cases," he said, "and every one of them is laid out...
A pious man had given his life to discipline — studying Torah, eating little, owning less. His sister-in-law accused him of stealing her jewelry. The charge was false, but the cour...
Gaster's Exempla (1924), No. 225, tells a sad little case study in academic cruelty. Rabbi Dimi of Nehardea had arrived in Babylon with a cargo of figs to sell. It was custom that ...
Rabbi Meir was traveling and stopped for Shabbat at an inn. The innkeeper's name was Kidor. Meir did not like the name. It reminded him of a verse in Deuteronomy 32:20, where God w...
A rich man lay dying, and he called his son to the bedside. He made him swear one oath — "Never take an oath yourself. Not in court, not in dispute, not for any price." The son agr...
Rav — one of the founding figures of the Babylonian Talmud, third century CE — had a difficult wife. Whenever he asked her to cook a particular dish, she would prepare its opposite...
A Jewish merchant had sold his wares in a distant land at great profit. As he prepared to travel home with the caravan, a stranger attached himself to the group. The stranger watch...
A man had three daughters, and each carried a flaw. The first was a thief who could not keep her hand from what was not hers. The second was lazy and refused the work a household r...
A man was in the habit of rising from his meals without washing his hands properly. He left the table with crumbs and traces of the food on his fingers, indifferent to the small ri...
A heretic — a min in the Talmud's vocabulary — once confronted a simple Jew named Gaboha ben Pesisa and mocked him. "Woe to you, you living who say that the dead rise again. You wi...
A student once stood before Rabbi Chanina in prayer and reached for every adjective he could find. O God — who art great, mighty, formidable, magnificent, strong, terrible, valiant...
Four small teachings, stitched together like beads on a string, preserve what the sages thought mattered most in daily life. Rava said the man who pursues wisdom will receive the b...
The Talmud keeps a ledger of shorter sayings — proverbs worn smooth by repetition, each one a whole argument compressed into a sentence. "Do not do to others what you would not hav...
A man in Jerusalem held a grand banquet. He had a friend named Kamtza and an enemy named Bar Kamtza. He sent his servant to invite Kamtza. The servant, confused by the similar name...
The old rabbis were poets of the short sentence. Here is a small anthology of proverbs preserved in the Midrash — each one a stone you can carry in your pocket. On speech: Op...
Rabbi Ishmael was known as a master of dream-interpretation. Two students with identical dreams could come to him and walk away with opposite readings, because Ishmael understood t...
This is one of the strangest moments in Targum Pseudo-Jonathan's creation story — and one of its most famous. The Torah simply says God made "two great lights." The Targum on (Gene...
Naming is an act of authority. In Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 2:19), the Lord creates every beast of the field and every fowl of the heavens and brings them to Adam "to see ...
