13 myths
A Roman emperor digs Mount Nebo for the bones of Moses, but the grave keeps leaping from summit to base until the mountain wins.
God carried the Torah first to Esau and Ishmael, who heard one command they could not bear and handed the fire back, until Israel said yes.
On his last day Moses did the arithmetic and it frightened him. Bilam was called a prophet too. Both of them were going to die.
God dug Moses's grave with His own hands and buried him on Mount Nebo. He hid it so well it appears in different places to different observers.
Moses dies alone on the mountain, and Michael comes to bury him. But the Accuser blocks the grave, claiming the prophet's body as his own.
Moses climbed Abarim at a hundred and twenty and looked out at the country he would not enter. He was still speaking to Joshua when the cloud came down.
God sent Gabriel, then Michael, then the sword-bearing Samael to take Moses, but none could touch the man worth six hundred thousand.
At the border he will never cross, Moses tells God that Adam broke one command and died, while he broke none. So why must he die too?
Every Torah scroll ends with Moses dying. The Talmud wrestled with who wrote those final words and how Moses could have done it.
Moses was a hundred and twenty and his eyes were still sharp. What had gone was the Torah. On his last morning the gates of wisdom shut in front of him.
His brothers got vineyards and grain while he got mountains and a raw shore. So Zebulun went up and told God he had been shortchanged.
On the last day of his life, atop Mount Nebo, Moses is shown not a map of the land but the centuries of war and rescue that will sweep across it.
Angels stood by the bed before the man knew he was dying. His soul came loose at the feet, and his sight got sharper as it rose.
