4,128 texts · Page 60 of 86
The Emperor asks R. Akiba:—“Why is it said, God gives wisdom to the wise and not to the fool ?" R. Akiba simulates illness; the Emperor sends medicine worth a iooo denars. i 55 - R...
Adrianus asks R. Joshua why God’s name is not mentioned in the five last commandments, which appears to apply to all nations. Joshua takes him over the town and shows him his statu...
A Roman noblewoman — a Matrona, as the sages called her — came to a rabbi with a question that seemed trivial but concealed a deep truth. "Why," she asked, "is the letter Lamed tal...
The story of the false prophets Ahab ben Kolaya and Zidkia b. Maaseya. They went to the daughter of Nebuchad- nezar and by false prophecies tried to induce her to sin, The king kno...
A Matrona asked R. Jose b. Halafta why it was said "God gives wisdom to the wise.” The answer was: "Because they know how to make use of it, they study in schools and colleges and ...
A Matrona charged R. Jeliuda b. Hai with being an usurer or rearer of swine (that was why he looked so well-fed): He denied it and explained that it was due to his cleanliness and ...
A Min and R. Abahu disputed about the sequence of Ps. 3—57 and he asked why Absolom was mentioned before Saul. The reply was that, in the Bible events were not always narrated in c...
A Min and R. Ami disputed about the resurrection of the dead after they are changed into dust. R. Ami replied with., a parable. A king ordered his servants to build a palace where ...
Two Jews were carried away captive from Mount Carmel. The captor following them overheard one saying to the other “A she -camel has passed before us, she is blind of one eye and on...
Proklos b. Filoslos asks R. Gamliel why does not God destroy the idols. The Rabbi replies "If a man calls a dog by the name of his father, will the father be angry with the son or ...
Rabbi Jehuda ben Hanina was traveling through Rome when he saw something that stopped him in his tracks. In the slave market — that brutal engine of the Roman economy where human b...
Zophnat, daughter of the high priest, was torn from everything she had ever known. Sold into slavery, she stood on the auction block while the seller stripped away her garments one...
When King Ptolemy of Egypt ordered the Hebrew Bible translated into Greek, the sages of Israel did not celebrate. They mourned. The day the Torah was rendered in a foreign tongue, ...
The Egyptians brought their case before Alexander of Macedon, and they were confident they would win. Their claim was simple: when the Israelites left Egypt during the Exodus, they...
Rabbi Akiva sat in a Roman prison, and his captors gave him a choice: abandon the Torah, or rot in chains. He chose the chains. The Roman authorities pressed him repeatedly. They o...
Rabbi Akiva was locked in a Roman prison, cut off from his students and colleagues. But the study of Torah does not stop for prison walls. Rabbi Johanan ben Nuri had an urgent ques...
The students of Rabbi Akiba were traveling on a road between towns when they spotted a band of robbers approaching from the opposite direction. The bandits were armed and dangerous...
Ankelos ben Kalinikos, nephew of the Roman Emperor Titus, was searching for truth. Despite being born into the most powerful family in the world, he felt a spiritual hunger that Ro...
A man decided to divorce his wife. On paper, this was his right — Jewish law permitted a husband to initiate divorce proceedings under certain circumstances. But this man had a pro...
The Romans led Rabbi Shimon ben Gamliel and Rabbi Ishmael ben Elisha to their execution together. Both were among the greatest sages of their generation, and both had been condemne...
Two boys walked past a group of Elders who were sitting together in study. One boy had his head covered, as was the custom of modesty and reverence. The other boy walked by with hi...
Nakdimon ben Gorion was one of the wealthiest men in Jerusalem, and he had made a dangerous bargain. He borrowed twelve wells of water from a Roman nobleman — the Hegemon — promisi...
The tribe of Asher received its inheritance in a strip of land along the northern coast of the Land of Israel, and the blessing that Moses gave them proved spectacularly true: "Let...
Eleazar, the son of Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai, inherited more than his father's wisdom. He inherited superhuman strength. One day, Eleazar was sitting at a lavish meal — and when Ele...
Rabbi Eleazar ben Shimeon was not a small man, and the Talmud does not hide this fact. Multiple stories describe his extraordinary physical size, his immense strength, and — as thi...
R. Eleazar b. Shimeon was a very strongly built man and used to carry people across the river upon his shoulders. Once the Prophet Elijah came to him in the form of an old man and ...
Rabbi Akiva sat in judgment over a case that would become one of the most famous legal rulings in all of rabbinic literature. A man had publicly humiliated a woman by tearing the c...
Benjamin the Righteous served as the guardian of the community charity fund. Every donation that came in, every disbursement that went out, passed through his honest hands. The peo...
Rabbi Shimon ben Antipatros had a reputation that troubled the sages of Israel. Travelers who stayed at his house reported something alarming: their host beat his guests. Not robbe...
A farmer once looked at his fields and made a calculation that seemed clever at the time. The Torah commands that a tenth of every harvest must be given as a tithe. The farmer deci...
There was a man who paid his tithes faithfully every single year without exception. Rain or drought, abundance or scarcity, he set aside exactly one-tenth of everything he harveste...
Hananya, the nephew of Rabbi Joshua, was a respected scholar living in Babylon. And one day he made a decision that nearly split the Jewish world in two. He decided to set the cale...
A pious man owned a vineyard, and the hedge around it had fallen into disrepair. Gaps had opened in the fence, leaving the vines exposed to animals and thieves. The vineyard needed...
The history of the man in Laodicaea who grew immensely rich, because he left everything best for the Sabbath. He treated R. Hiya to a meal served on silver and gold trays.
Dispute between R. Eliezer and R. Joshua about levi- tical purity. Appealed to in turn, the Harub tree [uprooted itself], the water turned back, the walls of the Midrash (rabbinic ...
The death and leave-taking of R. Eliezar the Great. He foretold to every one the manner of his death as well as the martyrdom of R. Akiba. He used the parable of the seas being ink...
R. Eliezer was taken ill. Four sages came to visit him and tried to comfort him, but none succeeded so well as R. Akiba, who said that suffering was invaluable for suffering begot ...
R. Pinehas b. Jair would never touch other peoples' bread. He crossed the river Ginai dryshod, when on his way to ransom captive after he had threatened that the river should other...
Story of the son of R. Reuben the Libellarius to whom the angel of death appeared in the form of an old man at the wedding festivities. He was treated with great respect on the adv...
(147.) R. Akiba began his life as a very poor man and ended it as a very rich one. He had a large crown made for his wife set with many precious stones, and when his children asked...
Skipping one small ritual cost a man his entire identity. According to a tale preserved in the Exempla of the Rabbis, a 1924 compilation by Moses Gaster drawn from medieval Jewish ...
A man used to neglect to wash his hands after meals and another, observing the traces of the last meal on his fingers, went to that man's wife. He mentioned the food last partaken ...
R. Hanina b. Dosa who had preached on the text, “Receive every man as a friend" carried a Hegemon on his shoulders to his house; he washed his feet, fed him well and then carried h...
Rabbi Hanina ben Dosa was one of the most miracle-working sages in all of Jewish history. He lived in grinding poverty — the Talmud says that each week he survived on a single meas...
R. Hanina b. Dosa told his wife that heaven would provide for the Sabbath meals, and bade his daughter light a wick in a vessel filled with vinegar; it burned. The oven which his w...
The son of Rabbi Johanan ben Zakkai fell desperately ill. The great sage, who would one day preserve Judaism itself by establishing the academy at Yavneh after the destruction of t...
R. Joshua asked the students what R. Elazar b. Azaf yah taught. They replied that he taught that all without exception must attend school and service, for all that would attend wou...
R. Janai and R. Johanan watched two Jews of whom two astrologers had said that a snake would kill them. They came home unharmed as no astrology was of any avail against Jews.
