80 myths · Page 1 of 2
God decides to tell Abraham what he is about to do to Sodom. Abraham recognizes an opening and presses it, bargaining God down from fifty righteous to ten.
Before Abraham left his father's house, he asked Sarah for one kindness, a single word she would speak in every strange land. Call me your brother.
Sarah wanted the slave and her son out of the house. Abraham did not argue with his wife. He argued with God, and God told him to do what she said.
The two young men waited with the donkey. Ahead of them a ridge held fire from ground to sky. They looked and saw only desert.
Servants slept in the tents. Abraham took the leather himself. Isaac was still breathing in the dark, and the road to Moriah would not wait.
God said he would rain down on Sodom. The rabbis found a hidden offer in that word: rain can be water or fire. Sodom chose fire.
Abraham could not see. The angel held him upright. Then a voice from the fire told him to look down through the floors of heaven.
Abraham told his servants that he and the boy would both come back down. Mastema watched to see if the father would break. The ram was already in the thicket.
When the water ran out in the wilderness, Hagar put Ishmael under an olive tree and walked a bow-shot away. She could not watch him die.
The sun dropped below the horizon at noon, and Jacob stood in sudden dark at the foot of Mount Moriah, two days from where he meant to be.
Abraham was ninety-nine and three days past his own circumcision, sitting in the midday heat. He got up and ran to fetch butter, milk, and a tender calf.
Abraham put bread and a water-skin on Hagar's shoulder. When it ran dry she set Ishmael under a bush and sat far enough not to watch him die.
Sodom's stones held sapphire and its dust held gold, so the city closed its roads to the wayfarer. The fire answered.
The cut was three days old. Abraham sat in the tent door in the heat. God came to the sick man before any stranger reached the road.
Abraham pitched his tent where Sodom's gates could still be smelled. Travelers reached him first. After the fire, he packed the ropes and moved.
Sarah stood in a palace where every womb had shut, even the hens. Abraham prayed for that king, and the next name heaven spoke was hers.
Old man, Samael said, will you slaughter the son you got at a hundred? Abraham kept walking. So the Accuser tried the boy instead.
Isaac was breathing. The ram kicked in the thicket. Abraham would not come down until the mountain itself was sworn as mercy.
The ram that saved Isaac did not vanish into smoke. Its horns became the sound that opens judgment, Sinai, and the end of days.
On the road to Moriah, Ha-Satan, the Accuser, blocked Abraham three times as an old man, a young man, and a flood. Abraham crossed all three.
Lot took the judge's seat the same day two strangers walked through the gate. He barred his door before the city could apply its law.
The ram had been waiting since the first dusk. Samael tangled its horns in the thicket. Abraham looked up from the knife and saw it catch his shawl.
Peletith hid bread in her water bucket and carried it to the starving man in her street. Sodom burned her for feeding him.
Lot looked east, saw grass, and moved his tents toward the city. Two of Israel's royal lines walked out of the cave above it at dawn.
Isaac tells Abraham to bind him tightly so his fear won't ruin the offering. The same man later hammers out an imperfect peace with the Philistines.
She went looking for Isaac as far as Hebron. No one had seen him. Then an old man came back to say the first news had been a lie.
A girl in Admah hid bread for a stranger. The city smeared her with honey and hung her on the wall. Her cry reached heaven before she did.
Isaac told his father to bind him tight so a tremble would not spoil the offering. He looked at the angels, not at the knife.
The Angel of Death arrived at Abraham's tent in his most beautiful form on God's orders. What happened next neither heaven nor the angel had anticipated.
Ishmael shot arrows toward Isaac and called it play. When the water ran out in the wilderness, Hagar set him under a bush and walked away.
Michael sat through the whole meal and could not say why he had come. Abraham washed the visitor's feet and asked to see the gates first.
The fire that fell on Sodom from the sky had a partner rising from Gehinnom (afterlife of judgment) beneath. Both were prepared before the world began.
Their water skin was empty in the wilderness. Hagar sat Ishmael under a shrub and went off, because she could not watch the boy die.
Adam found David's soul in the book of generations with almost no lifespan assigned to it and gave seventy of his own years away.
Prince Mastema asked if Abraham would still obey. God said yes. Three days later the ram was already waiting in a thicket on the mountain.
Death knelt at Abraham's tent smelling of paradise. Abraham asked to see the other face. The servants around him fell before he did.
Abraham was ninety-nine and still sore from circumcision when three travelers came. He asked God to wait at the tent door until he had fed them.
Abraham told her the hour for modesty was over. She uncovered, and the noblewomen said out loud that they were not worthy to let their children drink.
Tobiyyah offers the man who guided him home half the silver he carried, and the man refuses, then names himself one of the seven.
Sodom burned people for putting bread into a beggar's hand. Lot fed two strangers anyway, after dark, and then his wife refused them salt.
Ishmael had been telling his brother for years that he was the braver son. Isaac was thirty-seven when he finally answered him out loud.
Sarah was ninety when a visitor promised her a son. She was not only old. She had been born with no chamber inside her for a child to lie in.
On one mountain two patriarchs were shown the same house in three tenses at once: standing, in ruins, and rebuilt in a time still to come.
In a city where feeding a stranger means death by fire, Lot hides two angels and his daughter Plotit smuggles bread to a starving man.
On Moriah the ministering angels broke into weeping above the bound boy, and their tears dropped into Isaac's eyes and stayed there for life.
A weary traveler from Elam reached the gate of Sodom with a bright carpet, and a smiling host showed him how the city turned theft into a service.
Wherever Abraham pitched his tent he planted one tree, and its branches rose or fell according to the soul that stood in its shade.
Sarah was still inside the tent when the promise landed. The cry from the plain came second. Abraham spent that hour on other people's houses.
