9,687 related texts · Page 159 of 202
In his work Against Apion, Josephus defends Jewish customs and beliefs against Hellenistic slanders. Here, he outlines the traditional Jewish view of marriage, starting with a clea...
Every nation on earth traces back to one of three men. That's the claim Josephus makes in the Antiquities, and he spends two chapters proving it—mapping the seventy nations descend...
Abraham didn't just go to Egypt to escape famine. According to Josephus, he went to debate the priests. When drought struck Canaan, Abraham heard that Egypt was prosperous and deci...
Sarah laughed when the angels told her she would bear a son. She was ninety years old. Abraham was a hundred. The idea was absurd—and yet Isaac was born, and his very name, Yitzcha...
Isaac was twenty-five years old when his father took him up the mountain to die. He didn't resist. According to Josephus, this is what makes the Akedah (עקידה), the Binding of Isaa...
Four hundred shekels of silver. That was the price Abraham paid for a patch of dirt in Hebron—just enough ground to bury his wife. Sarah had died at one hundred and twenty-seven ye...
The angel struck first. That detail matters. At the river Jabboc, in the dead of night, with Jacob alone and his entire family already across the water, a divine being appeared and...
Simeon and Levi waited for the festival. That was the key to their plan. While the men of Shechem feasted and drank, the two brothers slipped past the sleeping guards, entered the ...
God declared His secret name to Moses at the burning bush—and then Josephus, the first-century Jewish historian, refused to write it down. "It is not lawful for me to say any more,...
Ten times Pharaoh promised to free the Hebrews. Ten times he broke his word. Each broken promise brought something worse than the last, and according to Josephus, the plagues that ...
Six hundred chariots. Fifty thousand horsemen. Two hundred thousand infantry. That was the army Pharaoh sent racing after the Hebrews barely three days after letting them go—and he...
The Egyptians who chased the Hebrews into the sea did not drown quietly. According to Josephus, the water came crashing back accompanied by storms, rain, thunder, lightning, and th...
The mountain was on fire, the sky had turned black, and every person in the camp was convinced they were about to die. That was the scene at Mount Sinai when God spoke the Ten Comm...
The High Priest's breastplate could predict the outcome of wars. Josephus states this not as legend but as historical fact—the twelve gemstones mounted on the breastplate of the Ko...
There was a goat that carried the sins of an entire nation into the wilderness and was never seen again. Every year on Yom Kippur—the tenth day of the seventh month—the Israelites ...
The earth opened its mouth and swallowed men alive. Not in a myth. Not in a metaphor. According to Josephus, the ground beneath the tents of the rebels cracked apart with a sound l...
A donkey saw an angel before the greatest prophet of the ancient Near East did. That detail alone tells you everything about the story of Balaam. Balak, the king of Moab, was terri...
Moses did not die in any normal sense. According to Josephus, writing in the first century CE, the greatest prophet who ever lived simply vanished—swallowed by a cloud on a mountai...
The pattern that defined Israel for centuries started here: sin, oppression, repentance, deliverance. Then sin again. Josephus traces this brutal cycle through the first judges wit...
Samson killed a lion with his bare hands. No weapons. No armor. Just raw, God-given strength unleashed on a beast that charged him on the road to Timnah (Judges 14:6). He was on hi...
Eli the high priest had two sons who were a disgrace to everything he stood for. Hophni and Phinehas served at the Tabernacle in Shiloh, but they used their priestly office as a li...
The Ark of the Covenant—the holiest object in Israel—fell into enemy hands. And the man responsible for guarding it died the moment he heard the news. The Philistines launched a ma...
The Philistines captured the Ark of God and dragged it into the temple of their idol Dagon at Ashdod. They set it beside their god like a trophy. But the next morning, they found D...
Samuel had judged Israel faithfully for decades, traveling a circuit twice a year to settle disputes. But age caught up with him, and he handed authority to his sons—Joel in Bethel...
David knew he was dying. Cold had settled into his bones so deeply that no amount of clothing could warm him. So he summoned Solomon and gave him the kind of deathbed speech that k...
Not a single hammer blow was heard during the entire construction. According to Josephus, Solomon's Temple rose from the earth in total silence—the massive stones fitted together s...
She did not trust the reports. The Queen of Sheba—whom Josephus calls the queen of Egypt and Ethiopia—heard endless stories about Solomon's wisdom, but she refused to believe secon...
Hazael, king of Syria, tore through the eastern territories of Israel like a brushfire. The lands of Reuben, Gad, and the half-tribe of Manasseh fell. Gilead and Bashan burned. And...
In the space of twenty years, the throne of Israel changed hands five times, and almost every transfer was soaked in blood. Zachariah, son of Jeroboam, lasted six months before his...
Nine hundred and forty-seven years after the Exodus from Egypt, the northern kingdom of Israel ceased to exist. Shalmaneser, king of Assyria, discovered that Hoshea, the last king ...
One hundred and eighty-five thousand soldiers died in a single night. That is how God answered Sennacherib, king of Assyria, when he broke his word to Hezekiah and sent an army to ...
Daniel survived the fall of Babylon. When Darius the Mede took the kingdom, he elevated Daniel to the highest office in the empire—one of only three governors ruling over 360 provi...
Three bodyguards of King Darius entered a contest that would decide the fate of the Jewish Temple. The king had fallen asleep after a great feast and woke unable to sleep again. He...
The Temple was rebuilt, but the real crisis was internal. Josephus records that when the returnees from Babylon laid the foundation, the Samaritans—descendants of foreigners whom A...
The story takes its sharpest turn on a sleepless night. King Artaxerxes could not sleep, so he ordered his servants to read the royal chronicles aloud. They happened upon the entry...
In the decades before the Great Revolt, Judea descended into a spiral of bandits, assassins, false prophets, and Roman brutality that made the final catastrophe feel inevitable. Ac...
It all starts, as many intense stories do, with a separation. Specifically, the separation of God and the Shekhinah (שכינה), God's Divine Presence, often seen as the feminine aspec...
And what they've imagined is According to tradition, within Paradise – also known as Gan Eden (the Garden of Eden, paradise) – lie not just one, but six palaces, each a home for th...
We often hear about the benevolent angels, the messengers, the healers. But what about the ones who fall from grace? Let's talk about Dumah. According to Jewish tradition, Dumah wa...
It’s a question that’s haunted humanity for millennia, and Jewish tradition has some pretty specific – and unsettling – answers. According to Jewish folklore, demons can be born fr...
But what's happening on high? Well, according to a beautiful passage in the Zohar (2:40b-41a), the foundational text of Jewish mysticism, God isn't just observing. God's hosting a ...
But what about the other tree... the Tree of Life? Here's a mind-bender: God actually didn't forbid Adam from eating from the Tree of Life. He was free to partake! Genesis doesn't ...
Jewish tradition offers some fascinating ideas about why that might be. Let’s delve into the mystical concepts of Ibur, Yibbum, and Gilgul (the reincarnation of souls) – ideas that...
Kabbalists talk about this feeling too, but in terms of spiritual growth. Baal HaSulam, in his introduction to the Zohar, that mystical and foundational text of Kabbalah, uses a po...
And in the Kabbalistic tradition, particularly as illuminated by Baal HaSulam in his introduction to the Zohar, we find a path, a journey, towards that very connection. It begins w...
The great Kabbalist Baal HaSulam, in his introduction to the Zohar, a foundational text of Kabbalah, felt that way about his own generation. And honestly, reading his words, you mi...
We all probably have at some point. But what happens when that unwavering commitment actually causes harm? That's the kind of sticky situation that Baal HaSulam, in his remarkable ...
That’s often how it feels when delving into Kabbalah, especially when we're trying to understand the secrets held within the Zohar. But where do we even begin? The great Kabbalist ...
