7 myths
Myths, legends, and mystical writings about Asher from across Jewish tradition.
7 myths on JewishMythology.com retell how Jewish tradition imagines asher, 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.
Jacob keeps his word to Laban through a second seven years, and Bereshit Rabbah reads his faithfulness as a seed of the World to Come.
At one hundred and twenty-five, Asher gathered his sons and delivered the most systematic ethical teaching any of Jacob's twelve sons left behind.
Asher's territory produced olive oil that fed all Israel in lean years. Asher's daughters were so beautiful that kings came asking to marry them.
Deuteronomy says Asher's locks are iron and copper. The sages read this as a military claim: Asher's territory was the lock on the door of the entire land.
Asher's land produced oil so pure it anointed kings. When the Maccabees searched the defiled Temple for pure oil, one tribe's gift made the miracle possible.
When twelve tribal princes brought offerings at the Tabernacle, Naphtali came last. The rabbis found a theology of joy hidden inside the sequence.
The fields lay fallow and the storehouses thinned, but in Asher's hills the oil still ran in streams, and a nation came to eat.
