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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 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 ...
Rabbi Simlai delivered one of the most famous homilies in the Talmud (Makkot 23b). Moses, he said, was given 613 commandments at Sinai. And the number is not arbitrary. Three hundr...
The kabbalists posed a problem that sounds simple until you sit with it: no one is truly perfect unless he has observed all 613 mitzvot. And yet — who has ever done so? Not even Mo...
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...
A Jewish man named Nathan traveled to an island and was on the brink of committing a serious sin with a famous courtesan. The room was prepared. The door was closed. He was about t...
The Roman Emperor Hadrian outlawed the teaching of Torah after the failure of the Bar Kochba revolt in 135 CE. Rabbi Akiva refused to stop. He gathered students in public and taugh...
Hillel the Elder — the Babylonian immigrant who rose to lead the Jewish people in the first century BCE — had eighty students by the end of his life. The Talmud in Sukkah 28a divid...
A scholar traveled on a boat with a group of merchants. They pressed him for information — What merchandise have you brought? Where is your cargo stored? He answered vaguely: my go...
A tradition delivered at Sinai remembers the day Og, king of Bashan, nearly crushed the camp of Israel under a single stone. Og stood above the valley and measured the camp with hi...
Kings are remembered in lists, and the sages kept careful accounts. For Hezekiah, they drew up two columns. On one side, the three things they praised him for. First, he dragged th...
The Rabbis of Bava Metzia 29b worked out what a person owes to what he finds. If you discover a lost scroll in the road, you have duties of preservation, not enjoyment. You may unr...
The Sanhedrin of seventy-one was not a single institution. It was the top of a ladder, and Rabbi Yossi remembered the steps. In each city of Israel sat a provincial court of twenty...
The last conversation between Moses and Joshua began as a gift and ended as a rebuke. On the day Moses was to enter Paradise, he turned to his closest student and said, "If any dou...
The prophet Isaiah once warned Jerusalem and Judah that the Lord of hosts was about to take away the stay and the staff, the whole stay of bread and the whole stay of water, the mi...
When the Torah laid out the rules for Israel's king, it gave three specific warnings. In Deuteronomy 17, Moses wrote that the king shall not acquire for himself many horses. He sha...
Rabbi Shela once punished a man who had sinned with a non-Jewish woman. The offender, smarting under the beating, reported the Rabbi to the king. Jewish courts were not supposed to...
Rabbi Akiva began his life illiterate and ended it the greatest Torah teacher of his generation. The bridge between the two was a woman named Rachel. Rachel was the daughter of Kal...
When a condemned woman died under Roman sentence, the students of Rabbi Ishmael made an unusual decision. They performed one of the earliest recorded forensic examinations in Jewis...
The Jewish community of Alexandria was enormous — perhaps the largest outside Judea in the first century CE — and its scholars were known for asking difficult questions. Once, they...
When Moses sent twelve spies into the land of Canaan, the legend of the Rabbis remembers that the land was inhabited by giants — not merely tall men but beings of such scale that a...
King Solomon warned a skilled builder — the man who had constructed his palace — that the builder's wife was unfaithful. The builder refused to believe it. Solomon did not argue. H...
A man walking across a frozen field saw a snake lying stiff in the snow. Touched by pity, he picked up the creature, placed it inside his shirt against his chest, and continued on....
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, ...
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 Emperor Hadrian once asked Rabbi Joshua ben Hananiah a sharp question. “Why is the Name of God mentioned only in the first five of the Ten Commandments, and not in the la...
Rabbi Elazar ben Shimon was a mountain of a man. Broad-shouldered, thick-armed, he used to earn a few coins carrying travelers across the river on his back. His strength was legend...
The throne of King Solomon, the legend-weavers said, was a marvel of engineering and meaning. It was made entirely of gold, with thirty-three steps ascending to the seat. On every ...
When Rabbi Judah the Prince — the great redactor of the Mishnah — lay dying at Tzippori, the rabbis gathered around his bed. The people of Israel fasted and prayed. On ...
Rabbi Gamliel and Rabbi Akiva were once sailing together on the Mediterranean when a storm struck. Akiva’s vessel went down in deep water. Gamliel, on a different ship, assum...
The Torah gives one of its most peculiar laws. If a Hebrew slave, after six years of service, chooses to stay with his master rather than go free, his ear is brought to the doorpos...
On the sixth day, the earth gets its turn. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 1:24) echoes the pattern already set in the sea: every living creature comes forth "the kind that is c...
The Torah ends the sixth day's first act with a simple line: God saw that it was good. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 1:25) repeats the clean/unclean doubling — beast of the ea...
The Torah simply says God created Adam "male and female He created them." Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 1:27) hands us an anatomy textbook. The Lord created Adam "with two hun...
The Torah says God placed the man in the garden "to work it and to guard it." Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 2:15) tells us where Adam came from and what the work really was. G...
The Torah says God will put enmity between the serpent and the woman's seed. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 3:15) turns that enmity into a long, conditional war with an ending....
Adam's expulsion becomes, in Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 3:24), a sweeping theological statement about everything God made before He made anything. God drove the man out fro...
Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 9:27) turns a brief blessing into a vision of the whole future of learning. The Lord shall beautify the borders of Japhet, and his sons shall be ...
Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 11:1) opens the story of the Tower of Babel with a claim so bold it has echoed through Jewish thought for two thousand years. All the earth was (...
When the Lord frames the covenant in (Genesis 17:7), Targum Pseudo-Jonathan slips in one of its most telling technical terms. The covenant is established between My Word and thee. ...
When the Lord lays down the sign of the covenant, Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 17:10) catches a case the Hebrew leaves implicit. Every male among you shall be circumcised — t...
The eighth day is the answer to a careful question: how soon can a newborn be brought under the covenant? Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 17:12) settles the timing and then push...
(Genesis 17:13) in Targum Pseudo-Jonathan turns a one-way sacrament into a chain. He who is circumcised shall circumcise him — the one already inside the covenant brings the next o...
Verse 14 is the hardest word in this chapter, and Targum Pseudo-Jonathan does not round its edges. The uncircumcised male — unless he have someone to circumcise him — shall be cut ...
(Genesis 17:23) is the verse in which Abraham stops listening and starts doing. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan renders it with the urgency the Hebrew encodes: Abraham took Ishmael his son,...
Once the camels had finished drinking — all ten of them, every last swallow — the servant reached into his pack and took out jewelry. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 24:22) refu...
Where was Isaac during all this? The Torah says he was "coming from Beer-lahai-roi." Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 24:62) tells us something far more specific. He was coming f...
Rebekah is pregnant at last — and the pregnancy is not gentle. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 25:22) describes the twins inside her pressing against each other like men at war....
