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The sages taught that when a person stands at the judgment seat of the Holy One after death, six questions are put to the soul. They are not trick questions. They are the exam the ...
Sarah, Rebecca, and Rachel all went through seasons of barrenness before they bore children, even though each was promised a great nation through her womb. The sages asked why the ...
The prophet Elijah came to a young man with a simple offer. He could have seven good years of prosperity, either at the beginning of his life or at the end. The choice was his. The...
In the time of King Suleiman, a vizier's wife had borne nine daughters in a row. As her tenth pregnancy advanced, the vizier grew frantic for a son. He warned his wife that if she ...
Abaye, one of the greatest sages of the Babylonian Talmud, had a vision of the world to come. He learned who his neighbor in Gan Eden would be, and the neighbor turned out to be a ...
Rabbi Akiva had a pious first wife who fed and housed his five hundred students for years. On her deathbed she asked her daughter to continue the work. The daughter accepted the tr...
Tractate Gittin (folio 57, column 2) preserves one of the most devastating martyrdom stories in all of rabbinic literature — a Jewish mother and her seven sons dragged before a Rom...
One of the most formidable women in the Talmud was Beruriah, wife of Rabbi Meir. She appears mostly in fragments — but in one famous passage she corrects her husband's Hebrew, and ...
Shechem son of Hamor once assembled a troupe of girls with tambourines to play outside the tent of Dinah, and when she "went out to see them" (Genesis 34:1), he carried her off. Fr...
A Roman emperor once asked Rabbi Joshua ben Hananiah a question designed to be unanswerable: do the dead truly return to life? "They have become dust," the emperor said. "How can d...
A woman attended the lectures of Rabbi Meir and came home late. Her husband, furious, demanded to know where she had been. When she told him she had been listening to Torah, he gav...
Rabbi Yehoshua of Sikhnin taught in the name of Rabbi Levi that when the Holy One, Blessed be He, prepared to fashion the first woman, He held a quiet council with Himself about an...
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...
Two of Rabbi Meir's sons died on Shabbat afternoon. They had been in the house while their father was at the synagogue leading the congregation. When Rabbi Meir came home, he asked...
A woman had been married for ten years and could not conceive. Her husband, following the ruling that a childless marriage of ten years permits divorce, declared his intention to s...
One morning Rabban Yochanan ben Zakkai rode out of Jerusalem with his disciples. On the road, he saw a young woman bent over, picking individual barley grains out of the droppings ...
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...
The midrash tells of the last days of Jerusalem under Roman siege. One of the wealthiest women of the city, Miriam the daughter of Baythus, sent her servant to buy flour for the ho...
The old collections preserve a small anecdote about a woman named Justina, daughter of Asverus, who was said to have been married at six years old and to have borne a child at seve...
Beruriah, the brilliant wife of Rabbi Meir, was the daughter of the martyred sage Hanina ben Teradyon. When her father was burned at the stake by the Romans for teaching Torah, her...
King Solomon once wrote in Ecclesiastes, “One man out of a thousand I have found, but a woman among all those I have not found” (Ecclesiastes 7:28). It was a line his m...
Before he was king, Solomon was a young boy with a gift for untangling impossible lawsuits. The tradition collected in the Parables of Solomon preserves one such case. A wealthy an...
There was once a widow who wept over her husband’s grave day and night. The rabbis kept the story as a bitter parable about how quickly grief, left alone, forgets itself. Not...
The Torah says God took "one of his ribs" to make the woman. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 2:21) gets oddly specific. "He took one of his ribs, it was the thirteenth rib of th...
Adam wakes up and speaks. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 2:23) gives him a line with an unusual opening: "This time, and not again, is woman created from man." The Targumist is...
God turns to the woman, and Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 3:13) lets Eve expand on the Hebrew's terse "the serpent beguiled me." In the Targum she says, "The serpent beguiled ...
Eve's sentence in the Torah is brief. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 3:16) weighs it. "Multiplying, I will multiply thy affliction by the blood of thy virginity, and by thy con...
Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 4:22) gives us the first credits for human culture. Zillah bore Tubal-Cain, "the chief (rab) of all artificers who know the workmanship of brass ...
Lamech's cryptic boast in the Torah — "I have slain a man to my wounding" — becomes, in Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 4:23), a defense plea. "Hear my voice, wives of Lemek, he...
One of the Torah's most mysterious verses, (Genesis 6:2), talks about "the sons of God" taking "the daughters of men." The Targumist keeps the image but sharpens it. Targum Pseudo-...
A genealogy in the Hebrew Bible almost always repays slow reading. The Targumist on (Genesis 11:29) drops a single clause into the list of wives and changes the whole family tree: ...
The Hebrew of (Genesis 12:5) uses a strange phrase: the souls they had made in Haran. How does one make a soul? Targum Pseudo-Jonathan answers in a single word that opens a whole t...
Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 12:11) offers one of the most quietly astonishing readings in the entire Aramaic paraphrase tradition. It explains how Abram can suddenly, after ...
The plain verse in (Genesis 12:12) is a husband's anxious calculation: when the Egyptians see thee, they will say, This is his wife, and they will kill me, and thee they will keep ...
The verse in (Genesis 12:19) is Pharaoh's outburst, and Targum Pseudo-Jonathan sharpens its center. Why saidst thou, She is my sister? When I would take her to me to wife, plagues ...
There is a detail in the Hebrew of (Genesis 16:2) that the Targum will not let pass quietly. Sarah sends her husband to her handmaid Hagar. The Hebrew says simply go in unto my mai...
The Hebrew of (Genesis 16:3) marks the moment with a small, precise number: after Abram had dwelt ten years in the land of Canaan. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan holds onto that ten and ad...
Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 16:5) lets Sarah speak at length, and the speech is a small masterpiece of grief, accusation, and memory. It begins quietly — my affliction is fr...
The Hebrew of (Genesis 16:6) is terse, almost stenographic. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan keeps the brevity but sharpens one word: authority. Behold, thy handmaid is under thy authority, ...
In the wilderness, Hagar meets an angel. And the angel does what angels rarely do — he names a child. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 16:11) keeps the name-meaning the Hebrew en...
The angel does not just name Ishmael. He predicts him. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 16:12) lets the prophecy roll out in the open: he shall be like the wild ass among men, hi...
At the spring in the wilderness, Hagar does something that no one in Genesis has done before. She gives God a name. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 16:13) renders her declaratio...
Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 17:16) takes the blessing the Lord pronounces over Sarah and stretches it forward across centuries. I will bless in her body, and will also give ...
Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 17:17) is the mirror image of Sarah's later laugh at the tent door. Abraham falls on his face. He does not argue out loud. He laughs — wondered, ...
The Hebrew says simply that Sarah was listening at the tent door. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 18:10) puts a second listener behind her. And Sarah was hearkening at the door ...
(Genesis 18:14) is the Torah's answer to every reader who has ever wondered whether God notices the small disbeliefs of the faithful. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan takes the Hebrew's ha-y...
The Hebrew of (Genesis 18:21) says only, "I will go down now and see." Targum Pseudo-Jonathan opens a window into what God is actually going down to see. And the window is heartbre...
Some verses in Torah are hard to carry, and (Genesis 19:8) is one of them. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan translates it without softening. "Behold, now, I have two daughters who have had n...
