On the first day of Shavuot the Ten Commandments were explained to the people homiletically in the vernacular.
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Homiletically, the word gemara (גמרא) spells out the first letters of the words Gabriel, Michael, Raphael and Uriel - the names of the angels that man is protected with when delving into Torah study.
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Rashi comments that the Hebrew word Bereishit ("In the beginning") can be homiletically understood to mean "Due to the first", where "first" (reishit) is a word used elsewhere to refer to the Torah and to the Jewish people. Thus, one may say that the world was created for the sake of Torah and the Jewish people.
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Rabbi Levi read homiletically to mean: "This is the law regarding a person striving to be high: It is that it goes up on its burning-place." Thus Rabbi Levi read the verse to teach that a person who behaves boastfully should be punished by fire.Leviticus Rabbah 7:6, in, e.g., Midrash Rabbah: Leviticus, translated by Harry Freedman and Maurice Simon, volume 4, pages 97–98.
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The Pharisees and Sadducees had differed over the interpretation of the Biblocal canon. The Sadducees adopted a stricter literal interpretation of the Bible against the Pharisaic stress on the Oral Torah and a non-literal interpretation of the written Torah with the usage of the oral Torah. Such interpretation advanced far beyond the literal interpretations. Later the sages of the Mishnah and Talmud continued with constructing a framework of interpreting the Torah homiletically.
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From his tenants and entourage, the king merely collected their tribute. But when another who was neither a tenant nor a member of the king's entourage came to offer him homage, the king offered him a seat. Thus Rabbi Phinehas read homiletically to mean: "If it be for a thanks giving, He [God] will bring him [the offerer] near [to God]."Leviticus Rabbah 9:4, in, e.g., Midrash Rabbah: Leviticus, translated by Harry Freedman and Maurice Simon, volume 4, page 110.
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This is a toponymic rejective phono-semantic matching of Polish Radom, the name of a town in Poland (approximately south of Warsaw), or of its Yiddish adaptation ródem (see Uriel Weinreich 1955: 609, Paul Wexler 1991: 42). Thus, if a pogrom had occurred in Radom, it would surely have been rationalized by ra dam ‘of bad blood’. Obviously, providing such an etymythological explanation for the pogrom was regarded by some Jews as a mere play on words. However, others might have conceived of ra dam as having deep intrinsic truth, which might have been religiously and homiletically based.
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Rabbi Isaac interpreted , "She sees the ways of her household," to apply homiletically to teach that all who lived in Abraham's household were seers, so Hagar was accustomed to seeing angels. Rabbi Simeon wept when he thought that Hagar, the handmaid of Rabbi Simeon's ancestor Sarah, was found worthy of meeting an angel three times (including in ), while Rabbi Simeon did not meet an angel even once. A Midrash counted , in which the angel told Hagar, "Behold, you are with child ... and you shall call his name Ishmael," among four instances in which Scripture identifies a person's name before birth. Rabbi Isaac also counted the cases of Isaac (in ), Solomon (in ), and Josiah (in ).
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Some have explained the word mamzer as the masculine noun form derived from the root m-z-r, having a meaning of spoilt/corrupt.Francis Brown, Samuel Rolles Driver, Charles Augustus Briggs, Edward Robinson, James Strong, Wilhelm Gesenius, The Brown Driver Briggs Hebrew and English lexicon: with an appendix containing the Biblical Aramaic : coded with the numbering system from Strong's Exhaustive concordance of the Bible, Hendrickson Publishers, 2005 According to Strong's Concordance: "from an unused root meaning 'to alienate'; a mongrel, i.e., born of a Jewish father and a heathen mother".Strong’s Concordance: #4464 The Talmud explains the term homiletically as consisting of the words mum (defect) and zar (strange/alien), a euphemism for an illicit union in the person's lineage.
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Zeraim deals principally with the religious and social aspects of the agricultural laws of the Torah. It explains and elaborates upon the Torah commandments regarding to the rights of the poor and of the priests and Levites to the produce of the harvest, as well as the rules and regulations concerning the cultivation and sowing of fields, gardens and orchards. These laws are dealt with in eleven tractates, each of which concerns a separate aspect of the general subject for which this Order is named. The first tractate, Berakhot, concerns the daily prayers and blessings that observant Jews are obligated to recite. One explanation for the inclusion of the tractate Berakhot, whose topic is seemingly quite different from the remainder of the tractates of the Order is given in the Talmud itself (Shabbat 31a), by Resh Lakish, who homiletically states that the first of the six terms in a verse in Isiah () – the word “emunah” (faith) corresponds to Seder Zeraim.
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