61 myths · Page 1 of 2
Abraham cuts the covenant animals at God's command. When darkness falls, fire passes through the pieces and shows him hell.
Abraham is waiting for the evening sacrifice at the altar when a bird descends on the carcasses. It tells him to run before he burns.
In the Apocalypse of Abraham, the Covenant Between the Pieces becomes a cosmic ascent. Abraham ends up in the seventh heaven watching the end of history unfold.
The Torah introduces Abraham as a grown man. The older traditions say his father had already saved his life once by swapping him for a slave child.
Abraham had killed the sons of a righteous man and rode home expecting to be cursed for it. Shem came out on the road carrying bread and wine.
The blessing Isaac spoke over Jacob at Beersheba was not new. The same words had been spoken twice before, first to Adam, then to Noah, now to Jacob.
The chronologies of Jubilees place Abraham and Noah in overlapping lifetimes. The man of the flood and the father of the nation shared the same world.
Abraham accused God of slipping out of His own oath. God answered by offering to march every generation He had ever destroyed past him, one at a time.
Before Abraham became the great icon-breaker, his mule panicked at a Syrian inn and broke three idols. The first crack came by accident.
God had Abraham ready before Adam and held him back on purpose. Twenty generations later, five angels came out of heaven to finish Israel.
Abraham entered Canaan, saw its figs and olives and mountain water, built altars on ground that was not yet his, then asked God how the promise could survive.
Sarah laughed behind the tent door, denied it, and God called her out directly. She was the only woman the divine voice ever addressed.
Pregnant in the desert, Hagar called the voice she heard El Ro'i, God Who Sees Me. Bereshit Rabbah and Philo's Midrash disagree about who she spoke to.
The four kings who captured Lot were not really after Lot. They were after Abraham. The texts trace the grudge back through Nimrod to the furnace at Kasdim.
Abraham was ninety-nine and already had a son he loved. He asked God to let that boy carry the promise. The answer to him began with the word yes.
Abraham laid out the covenant animals and waited. Then birds descended. Philo saw in those birds forces that hunt virtue precisely when it stands most exposed.
Abraham wears a healing stone at his throat, reads stars that cannot bind him, and fathers a daughter whose name means everything.
Abram knew how to read a horoscope, and his own said he would never father a son. God agreed with the reading, then took him up above the sky.
Twenty years after the theft, Jacob sent word ahead to Esau. The message listed his cattle, his servants, his donkeys. It never mentioned the blessing.
Young Abraham serves the sun until it sets, then serves the moon until it sets, and understands that anything replaceable cannot be God.
God appeared to Abraham and used a name meaning enough. Enough for the foreskin to have existed until now. At ninety-nine, the body became the covenant's seal.
Abraham paid for a grave and signed a secret deed. His descendants could not take Jerusalem for a thousand years because of what he promised that day.
The knife came down on nothing. When Abraham looked up, an animal was fighting free of one thicket only to catch in the next, and it would not stop.
Abraham rode against four kings with too few men, so the sages named who fought in the dark beside him, an angel called Night.
The lone survivor of the Flood walked out of the drowned earth and into the tent of Abraham, carrying news that would send a patriarch to war.
Twice the man the world remembers as unshakably certain lay awake and doubted himself, once a cave-born child, once a warrior sick with blood.
Famine drove Abraham south. Border men prized open a chest of light, Pharaoh took Sarah, and leprosy answered on the fifteenth of Nisan.
Abraham protested he had no army. The angel Gabriel set him on a shoulder, set him at Babylon's gate, and watched him shake a king's throne barehanded.
Heifer, goat, and ram lay cut in halves, and the birds of prey came down for them. Abraham drove the birds off and sat with the meat until sundown.
Between the pieces Abraham saw Babylon, Greece, and other powers march through sacrifice. He also learned how study would stand in for a fallen Temple.
Nimrod threw Abraham into fire for refusing idols. From the furnace he named the God of kings and shopkeepers. Outside, he unmade an old woman's stolen god.
Two years after the furnace, Nimrod dreamed Abraham rising from fire with a sword and an egg that drowned kings. A chick pecked out the tyrant's eye.
After the night raid that freed Lot, Abraham sorted spoil for Shem, son of Noah. Angels answered his prayer and named God his shield.
Famine drove them to Egypt. At the river Abraham saw Sarah's face like the sun, locked her in a chest, and bargained tax rates until the lid was forced open.
One man against royal armies. Abraham cried that without God's glory he was nothing, and the night itself split so he could slaughter enemies until morning.
Aner feared crippling in war. Eshkol feared blood loss. Mamre told Abraham to obey the God who saved two hundred forty-eight limbs, and God came to his oaks.
Before circumcision Abraham fell on his face at every word from heaven. After the covenant he stood, and the gate of Gehinnom (afterlife of judgment) closed.
Abraham wondered where to cut the covenant. He fell on his face, a scorpion bit the place, and he rose already marked as God's partner.
A runner reached the oaks of Mamre with the news that Lot was gone. Abraham armed three hundred and eighteen house servants and went after four kings.
Noah walked with God like a child holding a father's hand. Abraham was told to walk before God, a lamp bearer sent ahead into darkness.
Do not put your eyes on the money, he told three hundred and eighteen men. If it is silver and gold you want, it is already on your backs.
Abraham's stride stretched four miles as he ran to free Lot. He refused Sodom's gold with a raised oath-hand and kept heaven as his only patron.
After the quarrel over pasture, Abraham still names Lot brother, thins his army to Eliezer alone, and chases kings past Dan into Hobah.
After war, Abraham will not take Sodom's thread or strap, and heaven turns that refusal into Israel's beauty and a shoe cast upon Edom.
Israel's souls hang in storage until Abraham walks the earth. A letter of the Name remakes his name, and descent into history begins.
Between the pieces Abraham sees two futures, empire's yoke or Gehinnom (afterlife of judgment)'s oven. He sits all day, then chooses exile over the fire below.
The king of Shalem came out to the battlefield with bread and wine and blessed the victor first, God second. The office left him before the meal ended.
Abram shepherds muzzled their beasts against theft while Lot men grazed open-mouthed, calling the pasture theirs because a barren uncle would leave them land.
