38 myths · Page 1 of 2
The tradition of welcoming converts to Judaism, from Ruth the Moabite to the teachings of the sages on righteous proselytes.
38 myths on JewishMythology.com retell how Jewish tradition imagines conversion, 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.
Orpah kissed Naomi goodbye and took the road back to Moab. Ruth would not let go. The two women walked toward Bethlehem, and neither one carried bread.
Moses vanished into the clouds of Sinai for the better part of a year. When he finally came back down, his father-in-law was still there waiting.
King David had every reason to claim noble blood. Instead he traced his lineage to Ruth the convert and called himself a slave purchased from outside the house.
Three strangers brought impossible demands to Shammai and Hillel, and Hillel turned each absurd request into a doorway to Torah.
For two days the camp washed and beat its clothes clean. Some of the gold they wore came from Egypt, the rest from the sea after Pharaoh's army drowned.
The kings of the earth asked Balaam whether another flood was coming. He told them no, and every one of them went home relieved.
A non-Jew demanded the whole Torah in one lesson. Shammai refused. Hillel accepted and then reversed the alphabet to win the argument.
Manna fell in abundance the day Jethro arrived. Moses begged him to remain. Jethro said no, and the tradition honors his refusal as the greater piety.
Ruth gleaned only two stalks at a time even when starving. Boaz watched her restrain herself and understood that he was looking at something extraordinary.
She was ten years old when the sea split and fifty when she asked to be let in. In between she ran a house on the wall of Jericho.
Jethro had already paid for leaving his own gods before he arrived in the wilderness, and what he saw when he watched Moses judge all day frightened him.
A skeptic demanded the whole Torah on one foot. Hillel gave him a single sentence, then added three words that turned the summary into an obligation.
A foreign widow gleans barley at the edge of a Bethlehem field while the Shekhinah, the Divine Presence, moves through her toward redemption.
Jacob engraved the child's whole history on a gold plate and hung it around her neck. Then he left her at the border of Egypt for somebody else to find.
Every nation heard about the Exodus and trembled. Jethro heard it and packed up and walked toward it. The Midrash says that difference was everything.
Most people with seven names are hiding something. Each of Jethro's seven names recorded a different act of choosing the harder right thing.
Jethro sent word ahead before he arrived. God told Moses to go out and meet him. Three sages disagreed about what Jethro's message actually said.
Jethro heard what God had done for Israel and came. Midrash Tanchuma opens with a verse about the wicked and the dead, and reshapes what conversion means.
The emperor's nephew called Titus and Balaam up from the dead. He asked which nation is honored in the world to come. Both enemies said the Jews.
A man who wanted the High Priest's garments became a Torah scholar under Hillel. A robber who became a sage was destroyed by one sentence from his teacher.
Two verses disagree on the price David paid for the Temple site. Sifrei Devarim says both are right, and the math shows why the purchase was holy.
A convert argues that a coat and a meal are poor rewards for crossing into the covenant. A rabbi fires back with Jacob's own bargain on a stone.
Rome sent legion after legion to arrest the emperor's convert nephew, and each cohort sat down, listened, and crossed over instead.
Rome jailed Akiva to break his Torah, yet the governor's own wife walked out a Jew and a ruling slipped past the guards in a peddler's cry.
He paid four hundred coins and crossed the sea for one forbidden night, then his own fringes rose up and slapped him off the bed.
The priests said it was sacrificial blood. Nebuzaradan slaughtered animals on the spot to compare. Theirs lay flat and dead. The other pool kept boiling.
Potiphar's daughter mocks the slave Joseph, then sees him from her tower and falls. Seven days in ash, an angel, and paradise honey remake her.
In Tyre a sage rules a mixed-birth son must be circumcised on the Sabbath. Rabbi Haggai lays him down for lashes, traps him with law, and hears him yield.
The new owner struck her and she would not rise. He struck again. Dust settled on the unused plowshare and birds came down on the quiet dirt.
Men left money with him for safekeeping because he held a religious office. He spent it and woke up blind. His fellow priests blamed the idol.
