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.
Ishmael and Eliezer walked three days behind the donkey and saw only desert. Abraham and Isaac looked at the same ridge and saw fire standing in the sky.
Abraham had hundreds of servants but saddled his own donkey the morning he went to bind Isaac. The rabbis matched him against Balaam.
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.
God placed Abraham at the seventh firmament and told him to look down. He saw the heavens peeled back one by one below his feet.
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 handed Hagar bread and a skin of water at dawn. When the water ran out she set Ishmael under a bush and sat far enough away 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.
Three days after circumcision, Abraham ran to feed strangers curds, milk, and a calf. Then he stood in the road to Sodom counting down from fifty to ten.
Abraham stayed near Sodom to feed the travelers its gates rejected. When fire erased the city, mercy had no one left to receive.
Sarah's closed womb was not forgotten. Abraham prayed for Abimelech's house, and that mercy opened the door to Isaac at last.
The voice on the road came dressed as pity. Old man, it said, will you really slaughter the son you got at a hundred? Abraham kept walking, so it tried Isaac.
The angel called out and Isaac was safe. Abraham stayed on the mountain and would not come down until God agreed to remember that day forever.
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 his seat as Sodom chief judge on the day two strangers walked through the gate and the city assembled to enforce its oldest ordinance.
One specific ram, made at twilight before the first Sabbath, waited in Paradise for the moment Abraham looked up from the altar. Nothing of it was wasted.
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.
He came to her as an old man, harmless and weathered, and asked where her son was. She screamed three times, one cry for each blast of a shofar (a ram's horn).
Sodom had judges, courts, and laws built to punish kindness toward strangers and reward their suffering. Cruelty was the civic code, not the exception.
Abraham held the knife and Isaac held still, and the ram's horn that ended the binding became the shofar that will begin the final redemption.
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.
God sent the archangel Michael to fetch Abraham's soul. Michael could not do it. Then came the tour of the judgment hall and a man struck dead by a look.
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.
Hagar walked away so she would not watch the boy die. Their water had run out. God heard the boy, not her, and showed her a well.
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.
Before Abraham took his first step toward Mount Moriah, the outcome had already been contested in the heavens. An angelic accuser had arranged the test.
Death comes to Abraham dressed in beauty and light. Abraham does not believe the disguise and insists the angel show what it actually is.
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.
Under the terebinths the visit still looked like a visit. Sarah would have a son, God said first. Only then did He mention the cry from Sodom.
