9 myths
Myths, legends, and mystical writings about Anger from across Jewish tradition.
9 myths on JewishMythology.com retell how Jewish tradition imagines anger, drawn from the Hebrew Bible, Midrash, Talmud, Kabbalah, and later Jewish literature. Each story below synthesizes primary sources into a single narrative; follow any myth to read it, and from there into the source passages behind it.
Moses shattered the first tablets at the Golden Calf, but the broken stone was not thrown away. The fragments traveled with Israel.
Simeon and Levi avenged Dinah at Shechem. Jacob cursed their anger at his deathbed, forty years after the swords were put away.
Moses struck the rock and the water came. A servant who delivers a message with fury on his face has misrepresented the king, and the king punishes him for it.
On his deathbed, Dan told his children where the spirit that nearly made him a murderer had come from. It was older than any of them knew.
Doeg uses his tongue to destroy a city of priests, but David, trained as a shepherd, guards Torah and refuses to act in anger.
Dreams came thick after too much talk. Anger sat in the chest like a kettle. Two sages argued heaven's seats while the living spilled careless speech.
A father cast his own father into rags. In a loft a boy cut a mantle in half, and the house learned what honor costs.
Smoke still climbs from the Temple stones while Reish Lakish refuses to let Lamentations end in final contempt.
Rabbi Hanina shouted a lion off the road and then chased it down to take the insult back, and the same roar rose in Judah before Egypt.
