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Mar Ukba's generosity was legendary, but it was a woman named Hannah who embodied the even higher virtue of righteous silence. The Talmud (Shabbat 56b, Sanhedrin 31b) preserves her...
The story of Solomon's daughter and the bastard — the mamzer — is one of the most poignant tales in rabbinic literature. The Midrash (Tanhuma, Introduction) tells how Solomon, desp...
Solomon and the worthless woman — a tale from the collection of Solomon's legendary encounters with the full range of human character. The sages preserved these stories as illustra...
A man once made a vow that he would never lose his temper, no matter what his wife did to provoke him. According to a tale preserved in the Exempla of the Rabbis (compiled by Moses...
A king once raised a boy in total isolation, keeping him locked away from birth so that he would never see a woman. According to a tale preserved in the Exempla of the Rabbis (comp...
Rabbi Meir used to stop at the house of Judah the butcher whenever he made the pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Judah's wife was a righteous woman who looked after the traveling sage with ...
A married woman betrayed her husband with a robber — and the story that unfolds from this betrayal became a cautionary tale about the entanglement of sin and its consequences. The ...
Solomon & Daughter of King of Ammon. Gittin, f. 68b. cf. Yalk. Hadash. • m Hirz, Emek Hamel ekh, f. 15. Jellinek, B. H. II, p. 86. Eisenstein, Oser, p. 530. Maase Buch No. 104. Ten...
Abba Hilkiah — the grandson of Honi the Circle-Drawer — inherited his grandfather's extraordinary ability to bring rain through prayer. But his methods were so peculiar that the sa...
Before Rabbi Akiva became the greatest sage of his generation, he was an illiterate shepherd in the employ of Calba Savua, one of the wealthiest men in all Jerusalem. He was forty ...
A Roman Emperor once tried to embarrass Rabban Gamliel with a joke that sounded, at first, like a theological objection. "Your God is a thief," the Emperor said. "He put Adam into ...
A man in the Gaster manuscripts left his wife after many years of marriage. His reason was the oldest reason in the world: she had borne him only daughters. No son. No heir. He ann...
For twelve long years Rabbi Akiva had studied Torah far from home, leaving behind his wife Rachel, who had married him when he was an illiterate shepherd and had believed in him wh...
In the years after the fall of the holy city, a mother named Hannah and her seven sons were thrown into prison. One by one, in order of their ages, the tyrant brought the boys befo...
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...
A certain man in Jerusalem wanted to divorce his rich wife. The problem was that her marriage contract — her ketubah — stipulated a considerable sum to be paid to her in the event ...
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 drought had settled on the land. The sages, running out of options, remembered the legend that Abba Hilkiah — the grandson of the famous rainmaker Honi ha-Me'aggel — had inherite...
"And it came to pass, when Abram was come into Egypt" (Genesis 12:14). So the verse tells us, matter-of-factly. But where was Sarah? The midrash fills the silence. Abraham, knowing...
A pious but desperately poor man owed more money than he could ever earn, and his creditors had him dragged to the debtor's prison, where he was left to rot until his family could ...
Why, the rabbis ask, did Abraham only now, at the border of Egypt, realize that Sarah was beautiful? Had he never noticed before? One reading of (Genesis 12:11) goes like this. Abr...
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 man had publicly dishevelled the hair of a Jewish woman in the street, a humiliating act in the ancient world, where a married woman's covered hair was a point of dignity. Rabbi ...
Nakdimon ben Gurion, one of the three wealthiest men of Jerusalem before the Roman siege, had been so rich that, according to tradition, his daughter's dowry alone was twelve thous...
Rabbi Gidel was a sage of the third century CE, a disciple of Rav in Babylonia, known for his rigor in halakhah. He also had a peculiar habit. He used to sit at the door of the wom...
Rabbi Joshua ben Chanania, one of the greatest sages of the first and second century CE, used to say: In my whole life, no one has ever bested me in argument, except a widow, a chi...
The daughter of Rabbi Meir, one of the greatest sages of the second century CE, had a vision in a dream that her fate was sealed. Twenty-one years of suffering lay ahead. Seven yea...
Rabbi Yochanan bar Nappacha, the great third-century amora of Tiberias, was famous among his contemporaries for two things. He was one of the most brilliant legal minds of his gene...
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...
A man lay dying, and he gave his son one final instruction. With the money I leave you, go and trade. Put it to work. The son refused. People who trade are cheats, he told his fath...
Rabbi Zakkai, according to a tradition preserved in Rabbi Nissim of Kairouan's tenth-century work Chibbur Yafeh meha-Yeshuah, was granted an unusually long life. His students, puzz...
A woman was left in the care of her brother-in-law while her husband was away on a long journey. The brother-in-law pressed her to commit adultery. She refused. Furiously, he accus...
Someone once asked King Solomon about a famously bitter line he had written in (Ecclesiastes 7:28) — "One man among a thousand have I found; but a woman among all those have I not ...
Look again at the opening of Genesis. "Zachar u-nekevah bara otam" — "male and female created He them" (Genesis 1:27). Why does the verse call the single creature otam, "them," if ...
The son of Rabbi Reuben the Libellarius was being married. The feast was in full swing. The music was loud, the wine was generous, and the family was radiant. An old stranger came ...
The Talmud (Kiddushin 80b) tells a grim little tale to justify a rule about guarding appearances. Once a woman stood weeping over her husband's fresh grave. Not far off, a guard ke...
Rabbi Yochanan taught a strict rule in Yevamot 34b: a widow who waits ten years before remarrying will have no children with her new husband. The ten-year gap, the sages believed, ...
Rabbi Meir was one of the great teachers of the generation after the destruction of the Temple, and he had a problem. Wicked men in the neighborhood were harassing him. He prayed f...
Gaster's Exempla (1924), No. 191, preserves one of the strangest stories of filial piety in rabbinic tradition. Rabbi Ishmael's mother came to him with a request. She wanted to was...
The rabbis of the Talmud once ruled that a woman should not walk between two men, and a man should not pass between two women. The reasons were tangled up with concerns about purit...
Among those who forfeit their share in the world to come, the sages taught, is the one who reads sefarim chitzonim, "outside books." The phrase is a technical term. It refers to wr...
Beruriah, the scholar and teacher married to Rabbi Meir in second-century Tiberias, was famous for being able to hold her own against any opponent in Scripture. A woman belonging t...
A man in a Jewish town conceived an intention to commit adultery. He approached a woman who was not his wife and arranged to meet her secretly at a set hour in a set place. The Exe...
A young man fell in love with a young woman of his town. His feelings were so intense that he became physically ill. He stopped eating. He grew feverish. His family feared he would...
A Roman noblewoman, a matrona, came to Rabbi Yose ben Halafta with a question. She had been reading the book of Genesis, and she was curious about the birth of Rebecca's twins. "Wh...
On the day Isaac was weaned, Abraham threw open his tents and invited every household in the land. It was meant as a celebration, but rumor crawled in with the guests. Whispers pas...
A devoted couple in the Galilee had lived together for years without a child. Finally the husband came to Rabbi Shimon and said they had agreed to separate, since the marriage had ...
Scripture says that Jacob's family went down to Egypt numbering seventy souls (Genesis 46:27). When the sages sat down to count the names listed in the chapter, they reached only s...
