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.
The hangmen opened Jochebed's door and found the room empty. She and Miriam were standing there. God had taken them out of the men's eyes.
The midwives asked how to tell a boy from a girl while the child was still coming. Pharaoh answered with earth and rib, and a blade waiting for the face.
The daughters thanked him for the water. Moses pointed them at a dead Egyptian instead. Zipporah told him what her father's tree did to suitors.
Moses told God that Israel would not believe him. Heaven dropped the staff at his feet. It grew scales and crawled like the serpent that slandered first.
They strangled Israelites inside their own walls. A mother still named her boy Reuven, and would not teach him the overseer's speech.
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.
On the road to Egypt, at a lodging, the Lord met Moses and sought to kill him. An angel of mercy began at the crown.
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.
They had agreed to walk with Moses. At Pharaoh's wall the line behind him went quiet, and the two brothers entered alone.
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 inside. Shelomith thought the man in the doorway was her husband.
Pharaoh ran a finger down every name Egypt feared. The Name Moses carried was not written in the Book of the Angels.
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.
A she-wolf fed two boys on a hillside in Jotham's reign. South of there, Hebrew women laid infants in the furrows and left them.
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.
