478 myths · Page 3 of 16
Young Abraham smashes his father's idols with a hatchet, blames the largest one, and is thrown into a furnace by a furious king.
The chronologies of Jubilees place Abraham and Noah in overlapping lifetimes. The man of the flood and the father of the nation shared the same world.
Driven from the Garden in the twelfth hour, Adam wept and begged the angels for one thing before the gates closed: spices, so he could still pray.
No dust rose outside the tent. God opened a hole in Gehinnom, the afterlife of judgment, so heat would keep travelers away while Abraham healed.
God pierced a hole into Gehinnom (afterlife of judgment) that morning to make the heat unbearable. Then He told the angels they were all going down to visit a.
Pharaoh woke at dawn and could not explain the night. He had brought Sarah into his palace and had not been able to come near her.
Abraham had no teacher. He worked the law out at night with nothing to consult but his own body, and then he argued with God about Sodom.
Abraham accused God of slipping out of His own oath. God answered by offering to march every generation He had ever destroyed past him, one at a time.
Before Abraham became the great icon-breaker, his mule panicked at a Syrian inn and broke three idols. The first crack came by accident.
Abraham's father sent him out to sell idols. Abraham turned the shop into a courtroom and made every buyer doubt his god.
Abraham blessed Jacob and died that night. Later Jacob found the Shekhinah, the Divine Presence, waiting at Bethel, and night prayer became law.
Gabriel offered to go down and cool the furnace himself. God turned him down, gave a reason, and promised him three men in Babylon instead.
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.
God had Abraham ready before Adam and held him back on purpose. Twenty generations later, five angels came out of heaven to finish Israel.
The ram that saved Isaac did not vanish into smoke. Its horns became the sound that opens judgment, Sinai, and the end of days.
Before Ishmael was born, an angel found Hagar in the wilderness and gave him a name that meant God had heard his cry and future.
Abraham prayed for a stranger's house, and the closed wombs there opened. Then heaven turned to his own tent. Isaac was born with Abraham's face.
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.
Bereshit Rabbah compared God searching for Abraham to a king sifting piles of dust for a lost gem. Twenty generations of dust. One gem, gleaming.
The rabbis compared Abraham to a vessel struck by a potter. Ten times the tests hit him hard, and still his faith rang true.
Sarah packed him a fine garment and a turban with a stone in it, and told Abraham not to let the boy walk or sit in the sun.
Abraham entered Canaan, saw its figs and olives and mountain water, built altars on ground that was not yet his, then asked God how the promise could survive.
The gabbai counted the men in the Hebron prayer house again. Nine, with Kol Nidrei waiting. Then somebody knocked, and an old man in a white robe stepped in.
Abraham had been married to Sarah for years before her reflection in a stream stopped him. At the border he paid the tax on gems rather than open the lid.
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.
God took Abraham outside on the night of Passover to count the stars, then bound the twenty-two letters of creation itself to his tongue.
Pregnant in the desert, Hagar called the voice she heard El Ro'i, God Who Sees Me. Bereshit Rabbah and Philo's Midrash disagree about who she spoke to.
Before Abram left Haran, before he smashed his father's idols, he was a boy in a field commanding ravens to turn back. He did it seventy times in one day.
Jacob woke on his stone pillow in the dark and said out loud that the place frightened him. Abraham had named Moriah with the knife still in his hand.
