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Daniel stood before King Belshazzar of Babylon and delivered the verdict no ruler wants to hear. According to the Chronicles of Jerahmeel, a 12th-century Hebrew chronicle compiled ...
The jealous princes of Babylon set a trap with surgical precision. According to the Chronicles of Jerahmeel, a 12th-century Hebrew chronicle translated by Moses Gaster in 1899, the...
The contest before King Darius began with the first prince arguing that nothing on earth is as powerful as a king. According to the Chronicles of Jerahmeel, a 12th-century Hebrew c...
Haman did not just plot in the Persian court. He plotted in heaven. According to the Chronicles of Jerahmeel, a 12th-century Hebrew chronicle translated by Moses Gaster in 1899, Ha...
On the night King Ahasuerus could not sleep, something far stranger was happening in heaven. According to the Chronicles of Jerahmeel, a 12th-century Hebrew chronicle preserved by ...
Antiochus Eupator, son of the infamous Antiochus Epiphanes, inherited his father's hatred of the Jews. According to the Chronicles of Jerahmeel, a 12th-century Hebrew chronicle pre...
The Lord ordained that Judah Maccabee would not die in bed. According to the Chronicles of Jerahmeel, a 12th-century Hebrew chronicle preserved by Moses Gaster in 1899, at the end ...
When the voice stopped speaking, Abraham looked in every direction. No one. No breath of a man anywhere. His spirit was seized with terror. His soul fled from him. He became like a...
Abraham rose and saw the one who had grasped his hand and lifted him to his feet. The sight was overwhelming. Iaoel's body was like sapphire. His face shone like chrysolite. The ha...
They walked together for forty days and forty nights. Abraham ate no bread and drank no water. His food was the sight of the angel beside him. His drink was Iaoel's speech. This wa...
The angel turned back to Abraham. "Know from this moment that the Eternal One has chosen you. Be of good courage and use this authority, as far as I bid you, against him who slande...
The sun went down. Smoke rose from the ground like the smoke of a furnace (Genesis 15:17). The angels who held the portions of the sacrifice ascended from the top of the smoking fu...
Abraham turned to the angel in distress. "Why have you brought me up here? I cannot see anymore. I am already grown weak, and my spirit is departing from me." The mortal body was f...
While Iaoel was still speaking, fire closed in around them on every side. A voice was inside the fire, like the voice of many waters (Ezekiel 1:24), like the roaring of the sea in ...
While Abraham was still reciting the song, the fire on the surface rose up on high. He heard a voice like the roaring of the sea. The fire would not stop. And as it climbed, ascend...
A voice came from the midst of the fire. "Abraham, Abraham!" "Here I am." "Consider the expanses beneath the firmament on which you are now placed, and see that on no single expans...
Enoch was three hundred and sixty-five years old when the visitation came. He was alone in his house. Resting on his bed. Asleep. And in that sleep, a terrible distress seized his ...
The angels lifted Enoch onto their wings and carried him upward. The earth fell away beneath him. The air thinned. And then — the first heaven. They set him down on the clouds, and...
After the horror of the second heaven, the third was a revelation. Enoch looked down from where the angels placed him and saw a landscape of impossible beauty — a garden whose abun...
The fourth heaven was a machine. The angels carried Enoch upward and showed him the workings of the sun and moon — not as distant lights in the sky, but as colossal engines of fire...
The sixth heaven was order itself. The angels carried Enoch upward, and he found himself among seven bands of angels — radiant beyond anything he had yet seen. Their faces shone br...
The seventh heaven nearly destroyed him. The two angels lifted Enoch upward once more, and what he saw stole the breath from his body. A very great light — not sunlight, not fireli...
God continued speaking to Enoch, and the story of creation grew stranger and more terrible. He had made the heavenly circle firm. He commanded the waters below heaven to gather int...
There was one final thing to do before Enoch could go home. God called one of the older angels — a terrible, menacing being, white as snow, with hands like ice and the appearance o...
A dying man asked his wife and son to walk to the edge of Paradise and beg for mercy. They came back with a prophecy -- and a death sentence. Adam lay groaning on his bed, the seve...
A dying man's last request was simple: pray for me. What happened next was something no human eye had ever seen. "Now you know how we were deceived," Eve told her children, finishi...
The seven heavens opened. The sun and moon went dark. And every angel in creation wept for the first man who ever died. Seth rose from his father's body and went to his mother. "Wh...
Six days. That was how long the archangel Michael had said it would take. And on the sixth day, exactly as foretold, Adam died. When Adam felt the hour of death closing in, he gath...
A demon was feeding on a child. Every evening, after the workers building the Temple in Jerusalem finished their labor, a spirit called Ornias descended upon the boy who served the...
The boy dragged the demon Ornias to the palace gates. The spirit stood there shuddering, trembling, crying out and offering silver and gold to anyone who would free him. But no one...
Solomon asked Onoskelis one final question: "Under what star do you pass?" "Under the full moon," she answered, "because the moon travels over most things." "And what angel defeats...
A demon without a head was brought before Solomon. It had all the limbs of a man — arms, legs, torso — but where the head should have been, there was nothing. Just a stump above th...
A winged dragon with the face and hands of a man rolled into Solomon's court. Its body was scaled like a serpent, but its limbs were human, and great wings folded against its back....
The parade of demons continued. One by one the thirty-six spirits of the zodiac stepped forward before Solomon's throne, each confessing the disease it inflicts and the angel whose...
The thirty-sixth and final zodiac demon, Bianakith, confessed: "I lay waste houses and cause flesh to decay. But if a man writes certain holy names on the front door of his home, I...
The Chaldean army surrounded Jerusalem. But the real destruction — the kind that shatters heaven — had already begun inside the walls. On the evening before the siege tightened, Ba...
A cloud rose from a vast sea. Baruch watched it ascend — enormous, churning, filled with waters both black and bright, shot through with colors, and crowned at its summit by a bolt...
Thirty years after Babylon burned Jerusalem to the ground, a man named Ezra lay on his bed in the city of his captors and could not sleep. His thoughts boiled. His heart raged. Bec...
Uriel took Ezra back to the beginning. Before the portals of the world were in place. Before the winds blew or thunder sounded. Before the innumerable hosts of angels were gathered...
Levi, third son of Jacob and Leah, called his sons together when he knew his death was near. It had been revealed to him that he would die. When they gathered, he told them everyth...
Even the great prophet Elijah, the fiery champion of God, reached that point. Imagine this: Elijah, fresh from his triumph over the prophets of Baal on Mount Carmel (I Kings 18), i...
That feeling is at the heart of our story today, a tale I call "The Cottage of Candles," retold from Howard Schwartz's Tree of Souls. Once, there was a Jew driven by an unshakeable...
This isn't your typical biblical story. It’s a myth, a folk tale, preserved in the Israel Folktale Archives, about a wonder child who lived during the time of the Temple in Jerusal...
Tzadkiel isn't just any celestial being. He's the one who lovingly clothes each soul arriving in Paradise with garments of incredible purity, woven by the "Bride of God." – the car...
It's a concept that's woven deep into Jewish lore, appearing in various forms throughout our sacred texts and stories. One particularly compelling tale features Rabbi Loew, the leg...
It’s a wild one, and it involves a homunculus, a miniature, artificially created human. The story goes that Maimonides had a brilliant young assistant, a student he poured his hear...
The followers of the Ba'al Shem Tov, the founder of Hasidic Judaism, knew a thing or two about joy. Every year, they celebrated Simhat Torah – the culmination of Sukkot (the Festiv...
We all know the story: Moses, the parting of the waters, a miraculous escape. But what if there was someone else there, seeing even more than meets the eye? That someone was Serah ...
