20 myths
Naphtali carried a vision for ninety years before he told it. He saw his dead grandfather call a footrace and two brothers seized the sky.
Issachar watches his brothers receive visions and kingship, then tells his children he never sinned in all his years of farming. He explains what that cost him.
Asher did not warn his sons about murder or theft. He warned them about the sin no one sees coming because it looks like virtue from the outside.
Jacob told Joseph he conquered land with his sword and bow. Jacob was no warrior. The Mekhilta decoded both weapons and found they were made of words, not iron.
Jacob gathered all twelve sons before he died. Aggadat Bereshit turns that deathbed scene into the template for final redemption.
Jacob asked God to give people warning before death, and the mercy he requested became the illness that first entered his own bed.
Jacob's deathbed scene was not about blessing or inheritance. It was about one question a dying father could not take with him to the grave unanswered.
At one hundred and twenty-five, Asher gathered his sons and delivered the most systematic ethical teaching any of Jacob's twelve sons left behind.
On his deathbed, Simeon confessed he had planned Joseph's murder in his heart and traced the same spirit back through Cain to the first morning of the world.
On his deathbed, Dan told his children where the spirit that nearly made him a murderer had come from. It was older than any of them knew.
On the Mount of Olives, Naphtali watched his brothers race to seize the sun and moon. His two visions mapped the whole future of Israel and its exile.
Two handbreadths separated Jacob from Esau. Jacob scattered Simeon and Levi across the tribes. And the Targum hears Samson's name in the blessing of Dan.
Esau's body was not yet buried when his sons fell on Jacob's sons at Hebron, and the twins' old grudge became the first war between Israel and Edom.
For ten weeks of years no accuser walked Egypt, and the masters who once held whips bowed to the children of the man they had enslaved.
A warrior anointed from Ephraim rises to rebuild the Temple and falls, until the king from Judah descends girded for battle to slay the tyrant.
In the early generations a sneeze emptied a man of his soul on the spot, until Jacob begged Heaven for sickness so he could bless his sons.
A country priest of Modi'in buries a kinsman killed for surrendering, then marches his five sons against an empire's elephants and wins.
Satan built a face no man could resist and set it in the rabbi's doorway, so Matya took white-hot nails and burned out his own eyes.
Joshua cast lots to divide Canaan among the twelve tribes. The rabbis said the lots already knew the answer. Jacob had written it four centuries earlier.
Ehud forged a sword with two mouths, strapped it to his right thigh, and the fat king of Moab rose for God's honor in the breath before he died.
