477 myths · Page 16 of 16
The verse would not stay ink. Each brother found a knife alone. Their mother told the king a doctor had ordered a mole removed.
God drove the seas down from beside the Throne. They clawed for the height they were leaving. The cry they made still holds the rivers in place.
Ha-Satan (the Accuser) knelt before Nimrod in black silk and urged war on the child Abraham until Gabriel threw dark clouds between the boy and the host.
Michael found him among the oxen, still offering a beast for the road. The blessing stayed in his mouth. Heaven spoke it after he died.
Isaac feared he had blessed the wrong son. Then Esau stood in the doorway wailing that Jacob had once bought his birthright with a bowl of lentils.
Abram carried trays of his mother's cooking to his father's statues and waited. No hand reached. The next day he took a hatchet off the shop floor.
Anoko read the dream without softening it. The stars had named Abraham at birth, and while he lived no crown would sit still.
Ishmael had taken the cut at thirteen, standing. He sang about it until Isaac, at thirty-seven, let himself be bound on the mountain.
At Gerar the king told Abraham to settle anywhere he liked. Abraham heard the mockery in the offer and did not stay. At night his own body taught him Torah.
Four men were handed the same rod. Abraham was played with until God said enough. Hezekiah pressed his face to the wall and got fifteen years.
The oven floor burned before his feet found it. Ten years of irons, then fire meant to end the argument. He walked out with ash on his hem.
The images stood in the street. Abraham's oath was cut into the copper. David's men halted with their spears still raised.
Near death under desert thorns, Ishmael cried to Abraham's God. Years later Abraham left a coded message at the tent door, and the son understood.
Before the marriage scribe, an orphan freezes when asked her father's name, then points to the guardian who raised her, not the man who only begot her.
Abraham holds firm in Nimrod's furnace and names himself a wall. Generations later Rebecca keeps clean among the swindlers of Padan Aram.
Sarah said the Lord had shut her up. Shut, not sealed over. Then she walked across the tent and put her Egyptian handmaid into her husband's hands.
Sarah came into the tent hot. Abraham had the mother of his child under his roof and would not call her anything but his wife's handmaid.
The meat left the plate. The cups emptied without a wet lip. Abraham kept serving men who had no hunger, and the desert later ate from that hand.
The beadle woke with Abraham still speaking. At the court gate the coins were waiting, every one dated to the year meant to kill them.
Sarah told Abraham to write a bill of divorce that would outlast the grave. After she was buried, he reached back for the woman he had sent into sand.
Abraham fell on his face when God gave him a password no one else knew. Serah bat Asher, a girl in Egypt, would be the last to hold it.
A king fells his cedars but keeps the thorns that hedge his vineyard, while Daniel eats only pulse ten days to refuse the king's table.
No one had killed yet. Then Cain stood up in the field. God told him the blade he had opened would find its own maker.
Every one of the thirty-one kings Joshua killed had once reclined at Abraham's weaning feast, their names later written in a column read in one breath
The donkey drank first. Then Abraham pressed silver into Terah's palm. His father blessed him by gods that had cooked the midday stew.
Pharaoh's chariots behind them and a sea that will not open ahead, and God answers Israel's weeping by remembering a knife on Moriah.
She danced before the Throne on the sixth day and was betrothed to the soul of Moses. Centuries later she stood in sackcloth while men picked at her.
