27 myths
The Nile had carried his basket for seven days. When God sent blood and frogs, Moses would not raise the rod. Aaron struck the water instead.
When Aaron's staff swallowed the staffs of Pharaoh's magicians, the rabbis said the real miracle was not the serpents. It was dead wood consuming dead wood.
Pharaoh told Egypt he was a god who felt no human needs. Every morning he went down to the Nile alone to keep it up. One morning Moses was standing there.
Thirty thousand angels escorted Moses upward, and he was terrified. Qemuel met him at the first gate and told him he came from a place of defilement.
One frog whistled, and the marble floors split. Pharaoh watched a scratch on his palace wall until the hail came down and cut the trees.
Egypt's sorcerers could copy blood and frogs but failed at lice. From that single admitted finger the rabbis traced the whole open hand of Israel's rescue.
Ten plagues struck Egypt. Then the rabbis did the arithmetic on the sea and the number kept climbing, fifty, two hundred, two hundred and fifty.
The elders slipped away one by one until only two brothers faced a fortress of four hundred gates and lions, and an angel walked them in.
Pharaoh made the two old Hebrews wait while lesser kings finished their bows. Seventy secretaries were writing the empire in seventy languages. Pens stopped.
One frog croaked and an army answered, marble cracked on command, and Pharaoh finally suffered in his own body what blood in the Nile had left untouched.
Moses and Aaron each scooped ash from the brick furnace. Moses held both handfuls in one palm and threw them at the sky.
Moses scratched a line in Pharaoh's plaster and named the hour. When the sun reached it, ice fell with fire still burning inside.
Aaron's rod hit the palace floor. Pharaoh laughed and called it straw brought to a city of magic. He asked who the Lord even was.
That same afternoon Pharaoh took the straw. Dathan and Abiram stood in Moses's path and cursed him. The lamb was already between wolf and shepherd.
Every dawn Pharaoh slipped alone to the Nile. Moses seized him there and asked if any god must relieve himself.
The foremen came out of Pharaoh's house with their backs opened and cursed Moses in the road. Moses turned around and said the same thing to God.
He called himself a god who never had to squat. Moses was already on the bank. Later a frog asked the palace marble for room.
Frogs filled the beds and the ovens. Moses would not name the minute they would die. He handed the clock to the king who still called himself a god.
Egyptian fields already reeked of dead livestock. Riders went east to count Hebrew herds and came back with a number the king refused to use.
Hail mixed fire with ice. Livestock left in the open died. After the storm, flax lay black and wheat still stood in the same field.
The lions chained at Pharaoh's gate broke loose only to fawn at Moses's feet, and one staff swallowed the sorcerers before a single plague fell.
Pharaoh swore he made the Nile and needed nothing, so God set Moses as a god over him and sent him to ambush the king at the river at dawn.
A king of flesh and blood would kill a man for sitting in his chair. God set a runaway shepherd in the doorway with the Name Pharaoh had claimed.
Moses warned Pharaoh before each plague. Ten warnings, ten refusals. Jubilees says the plagues were not punishment alone but a debt paid to Abraham.
Pharaoh went down to the Nile at dawn as if the river still belonged to him. Aaron stood on the bank with the rod already raised.
The boy was hidden in the Holy of Holies and lived. Years later his princes called that proof he was a god, and Joash believed them.
Nebuchadnezzar wanted the heights of the clouds. He got grass. His hair matted, his nails curled into claws, and the beasts bit him as one of their own.
