76 myths · Page 2 of 2
At the bush Moses asked God to send someone else. God sent him anyway, and eighty-year-old Moses walked Egypt into plagues and a split sea.
An Egyptian taskmaster forced Shelomith while Dathan was driven to labor, until Moses struck the abuser dead and fled the men he had saved.
Pharaoh sent men to kill Jochebed and her daughter Miriam. God made the women invisible, and the killers found nobody. Jochebed's newborn walked that day.
Pharaoh ordered boys killed at birth by the face that leads. Israel kept Hebrew names, language, and brick-yard mercy anyway.
Moses credited a dead Egyptian for his Midian well. Zipporah answered his suit with Jethro's garden tree that swallowed suitors.
Moses doubted Israel would believe. Heaven turned his staff to a serpent for that slander, then gave signs of leprosy, blood, and a bush that would not burn.
Slaves without Torah still guarded names, language, speech, and sexual purity. Rabbi Eliezer said those four merits outweighed the world.
Officers told Moses that Israel was a sheep pulled by Pharaoh the wolf and by rescuers until the body tore, while Egypt planned total erasure.
The angel started swallowing Moses head first and stopped at the groin. Zipporah saw why, cut her son with a flint, and the angel let go.
Moses slipped his royal guard and went to arrange the slaves' loads himself, pretending to help Pharaoh. Pharaoh wore a brick mold on his own neck.
There are two ways to say goodbye in Hebrew. David used one on Avshalom, who never came home. Moses got the other at his father-in-law's door in Midian.
Pharaoh's daughter went down to the Nile to wash off her father's idolatry. Her maidens told her the decree still stood. Gabriel struck them down on the bank.
At the bush Moses said Israel would not believe. God put the serpent's leprosy in his hand, then remade his mouth to carry a nation's redemption.
The elders of Israel agreed to walk with Moses to Pharaoh's palace. By the time the gate came into view, the road behind him was empty.
Pharaoh's men set a knife on Moses's neck. An angel took his face, the blade found the wrong body, and Eliezer's name kept the rescue forever.
For six days God walks Moses through silver and gardens. On the seventh Moses still pulls his hand back, and a door closes.
At Horeb the bush burned and held. Moses stripped the shoe of flesh, gripped the staff of covenant, and sang through Hod until the sea split open.
One dawn the taskmaster led a Hebrew out early, then slipped back to the man's house. Shelomith thought it was her husband who had returned.
A prince walked out of the palace and saw what the brick pits were doing to men. Years later he came back with a Name, and the throne looked it up.
Pharaoh woke to stone cracking. A frog came up through the marble and named the One who had sent it. The king had called that river his own god.
Seeing a taskmaster beat one of his own kin, Moses looked this way and that, gathering the angels into a court to weigh whether the man deserved to die.
Warning after warning strikes Egypt, and Pharaoh hardens himself first. Heaven cooks his heart like twice-boiled liver, while Bitya lives by an old kindness.
An angel carries each unborn soul through heaven by day, then lets it go down into labor, into affliction, into the long accounting.
A dying Pharaoh begs his heir to honor Joseph, but throne after throne forgets the debt until the law itself decrees Hebrew sons drowned.
Pharaoh dreamed a lamb outweighed Egypt. Balaam urged the Nile. Reuel fled. Job shrugged. The decree learned to drown boys.
When Israel multiplied like underbrush, Pharaoh asked his counselors for a plan. Job of Uz stepped forward and proposed death for every newborn Hebrew son.
As a she-wolf nursed the twins who would wall Rome, Pharaoh tightened the yoke on Israel, and two cities climbed on one dark clock.
Moses came to the burning bush for a mission and left with a script. Abraham, Isaac, Jacob: the names God gave him there still open the standing prayer.
