312 myths · Page 4 of 11
After his victory in battle, Abraham feared Shem's resentment. Shem feared Abraham's anger. Their meeting transmitted the secret of the Jewish calendar.
Before God called Abraham, Abraham was already thinking. He worked through fire, water, earth, and the sun one by one until he found what none of them could be.
On the way to heaven, Azazel appeared and tried to turn Abraham back. The angel Iaoel gave Abraham the only words that would work.
When Abraham reached the threshold of heaven, the light was too much and his spirit began to depart. The angel steadied him before God arrived.
Abraham smashed his father's idols his whole life. Then God showed him a vision of an idol standing inside the Temple his descendants would one day build.
Pharaoh took Sarah into his palace and an angel appeared with a rod. Before striking, the angel stopped and asked the woman what she wanted done.
Gabriel made milk flow from his finger for the abandoned infant Abraham. Decades later he carried the same man on his shoulder into Nimrod's capital.
God sent Michael to inform Abraham that his time had come. Michael went, came back to heaven, and asked God to find another way.
Three ancient sources each gave a different answer to the same question: why Abraham, of all people born in Ur, became the pivot on which all history turned.
Before God called him out of Ur, Abraham spent years in Terah's idol shop watching stone gods fall over. The last one was the one he could not explain away.
God could have commanded the circumcision covenant at age twenty. He waited until ninety-nine. The Mekhilta says the delay was never about Abraham.
Abraham ran down four kings with three hundred men, but at the ground that would be called Dan a vision of golden calves drained his strength.
The rabbis imagined the covenant holding day, night, Sabbath, exile, final judgment, and the stars themselves in place by promise.
Before entering Egypt, Abraham dreams of a cedar and a palm entwined at the root, and understands Sarah cannot be separated from him.
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.
Abraham saw judgment, hospitality, circumcision, and the furnace of Gehinnom together, then kept pressing heaven for mercy.
Three strangers arrived at Abraham's tent in the midday heat. The rabbis said each one carried a single divine assignment and could not carry more.
A light burned in Sarah's tent from Shabbat to Shabbat. Her bread stayed fresh all week. A cloud rested over her tent. All three vanished the day she died.
From Adam to Noah was ten generations. From Noah to Abraham was ten more. God spoke to only two men in all that time.
God told Abraham about Sodom because the land was his by covenant. That made him a party to the verdict, and Abraham used the standing he was given to fight.
Before Abraham became the great icon-breaker, his mule panicked at a Syrian inn and broke three idols. The first crack came by accident.
Her name changed from princess of one to princess of all. The water rose for her, the angels asked after her, and God waited ninety years to keep his word.
Abraham's father sent him out to sell idols. Abraham turned the shop into a courtroom and made every buyer doubt his god.
In Ur of the Chaldeans, both brothers walked into fire. Only one walked out. What happened in that furnace is the founding act of Jewish faith.
Abraham lowered the knife over Isaac, then demanded that God remember the altar whenever his descendants needed mercy in every age.
Abraham was worthy of being created before Adam. Bereshit Rabbah explains why God waited: he was the center beam, placed where the structure needed support.
Before God could renew the covenant with Abraham, Lot had to go. Bereshit Rabbah is blunt about why, and what the circumcision changed between them.
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 another household, and heaven answered Sarah on the Day of Remembrance with Isaac's miraculous birth.
