2,692 texts · Page 36 of 57
"Go forth and gaze, daughters of Zion, upon King Solomon" (Song of Songs 3:11). The sages of Pesikta de-Rav Kahana 1:3 read that word tziyyon as m'tzuyanim — the distinguished ones...
The book of Proverbs throws out one of the great riddles of the Hebrew Bible. "Who has ascended to Heaven and come down? Who has gathered the wind in the hollows of his hands? Who ...
One small Hebrew word — kalot, "completed" — carries an entire wedding, an entire exorcism, and the steadying of the whole world. In Pesikta de-Rav Kahana 1:5, the sages pry open (...
The opening verse of Numbers 7 says a single thing twice. Moses "anointed the Tabernacle and sanctified it," and then the verse adds, "and he anointed them and sanctified them." Wh...
When the chieftains of Israel rolled up to the Tabernacle with six covered wagons, the Torah uses a strange word for those wagons — tzav. Pesikta de-Rav Kahana 1:8 turns the word u...
Shabbat Shekalim arrives on the Shabbat before the month of Adar ends, the first of the four special Sabbaths that prepare the Jewish people for Passover. The Torah reading is brie...
A single verse in Proverbs sparked one of the most unsettling debates in Pesikta de-Rav Kahana 2:5. "Tzedakah -- righteousness -- elevates a people; and chesed to the nations is a ...
After Titus destroyed the Second Temple in 70 CE, the Rabbis tell us, a small insect flew up his nose and lodged in his brain. It ate at him for the rest of his life. The only thin...
The Rabbis of the Talmud (Yoma 21b) teach that there are six kinds of fire in the world, and not all of them behave the way fire should. The first is ordinary fire — it eats but do...
At the most joyful festival in the Jewish year — the Simchat Beit HaShoevah, the Rejoicing of the House of the Water Drawing, held on the nights of Sukkot — the Sages did things yo...
During the nights of Sukkot, the Second Temple in Jerusalem lit up like nothing the world had ever seen. In the Court of the Women stood four giant golden lamp-stands, each crowned...
The Roman-appointed Jewish king Agrippa II, who reigned over parts of Judea in the first century CE, once tried to count the male population of Israel. Because a direct census of I...
During the Roman siege of Jerusalem in 70 CE, the storehouses had been burned by Jewish zealots to force the city to fight. Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai, walking through the streets a...
The Rabbis teach that King Solomon, for all his wisdom, committed three transgressions of kingship that the Torah had warned against. He multiplied horses. He multiplied wives. He ...
Simeon ben Kamhith was serving as High Priest. He had walked with a foreign king, and in the course of the conversation a drop of spittle from the king's mouth touched Simeon's gar...
When Alexander of Macedon marched east, the Samaritans — called in the Talmud the Kutim — saw a political opening. They sent word to Alexander asking him to destroy the Temple in J...
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...
There was a time, the sages taught, when the Divine Name of twelve letters was taught openly to anyone who came to learn. A student could carry it home the way he carried any other...
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...
When Herod seized the throne of Judea in the first century BCE, he fell in love with a Hasmonean princess — Mariamne — whose royal blood would legitimize his rule. She despised him...
In the generation after the Second Temple was destroyed, some men claimed to be descendants of the priestly lines and demanded the privileges of kohanim — including the right to ea...
The rabbis counted the wounds and found that five had opened on the seventeenth of Tammuz and five more on the ninth of Av, the two fast days that frame the Three Weeks of summer m...
For seven days before Yom Kippur, the high priest lived as if rehearsing for a wedding he could not afford to fumble. Oxen, rams, and lambs were paraded past him one by one so that...
The verse says Rejoice with trembling (Psalm 2:11). The rabbis took that seriously. If joy goes unchecked, they feared, it becomes carelessness, and carelessness forgets that the T...
How far must a person go to honor a parent? Rav Ulla was asked this question, and instead of answering with a verse, he told a story. There was a man in Ashkelon named Dammah ben N...
Her name was Tzafnat, daughter of Peniel, and her father had been high priest of Israel. She had grown up in the holiest household in the land, with the aroma of incense in her clo...
A strange statistic is buried in tractate Yoma. During the 410 years of the First Temple, only eighteen high priests served in succession. During the 420 years of the Second Temple...
In the Temple of Jerusalem, the most fragrant service of the day was the burning of the ketoret, the compound incense of eleven spices that rose in a thin column from the golden al...
The Talmud in Kiddushin 31a tells the story of Dama ben Netina, a gentile merchant of Ashkelon who became, in the rabbinic imagination, the standard for filial honor. The exempla c...
When Solomon set out to build the Temple, he faced a strange obstacle hidden in plain sight in the Torah. Scripture says that "the house, when it was in building, was built of ston...
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...
Rabbi Isaac noticed something in the book of Eicha, the Lamentations read on the Ninth of Av every year. "Her children are gone into captivity before the enemy" (Lamentations 1:5)....
When the Romans stormed the Second Temple, they faced a problem their swords could not solve: none of them wanted to be the first to walk into the sanctuary. The inner chambers wer...
When Solomon needed the king of the demons to help build the Temple without iron, he sent his captain Benaiah son of Jehoiada into the wilderness. Benaiah carried two weapons that ...
Rabbi Shimon ben Gamliel, quoting Rabbi Yehoshua, said something that should stop us: since the destruction of the Temple, not a single day has passed without a curse (Sotah 48a). ...
On the Feast of Sukkot, the Torah commands Israel to offer seventy bullocks across the seven days (Numbers 29:12–36). Rabbi Eliezer asked the obvious question in Sukkah 55b: sevent...
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...
At creation, Gaster's Exempla (1924), No. 156, tells, the lower waters of the tehom — the primordial abyss — tried to surge upward and swallow the heavens. To hold them back, God c...
On the day Solomon sought to bring the Aron, the Ark of the Covenant, into the newly finished Temple, the gates refused to open. Solomon stood before them and began to recite psalm...
Jerusalem was under siege. Day after day, the defenders inside the city lowered a basket of silver over the walls, and the besiegers below filled the basket with a lamb, a kid, or ...
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 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...
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 ...
The prophet Joel called him "the hidden one," and the sages took the phrase at its full weight. "I will remove far from you the hidden one, and I will drive him into a land barren ...
In the Temple service, everyone bowed thirteen times, corresponding to the thirteen shofar-shaped collection boxes and the thirteen tables arrayed in the sanctuary. Yet those who b...
Midrash Rabbah on Deuteronomy preserves a strange detail about the fall of the First Temple. When the Babylonian conquerors carried away the holy vessels, they did not carry away t...
The prophet Ezekiel writes, "I have set Jerusalem in the midst of the nations, and countries are round about her" (Ezekiel 5:5). Taken in its plain sense, the verse places the holy...
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...
