470 myths · Page 7 of 16
Two thousand years before there was an earth, a voice was already calling out for people to come back. There was nobody yet to come back from anything.
A wasp was eating a spider in the garden and a fool was swinging a stick at both. David asked God what any of the three were good for.
She kissed him and stopped. The goatskins were still on the kids in the flock. Adam had hidden in trees. She would not hide the blessing.
Their water skin was empty in the wilderness. Hagar sat Ishmael under a shrub and went off, because she could not watch the boy die.
Rebekah's twins fought inside her, and one threatened to kill her to get out first. Shem told her why: her body was holding two nations.
At the Jabbok ford a figure grips Jacob until dawn. Tradition names him precisely: Samael, Esau's angel, the prosecutor of Israel.
Adam found David's soul in the book of generations with almost no lifespan assigned to it and gave seventy of his own years away.
Naomi told her three times to go back to Moab. Ruth stood on the road and would not take a step toward her mother's house.
Two sisters, two brothers, and everyone in Haran knew which went with which. Leah heard what her half of the bargain was like and started weeping.
Leah held a firstborn who looked like any other child. She named him so heaven would see the affliction her husband would not.
The Angel of Death met Elijah at the edge of heaven and refused to move. He had jurisdiction over every human being alive, and he said so.
Asher was a hundred and twenty-five and still strong when he called his sons in. He told them a man can hurt someone in order to heal him.
Dinah was twelve when she sat with her mother among the dancers at Shechem. The prince took her by force. Heaven still wrote Levi's name.
Tamar stood by the stacked wood with Judah's seal in her sleeve. She sent it privately. She did not shout his name into the fire.
Moses walked the firmament to seize the Torah. When the angels demanded to know why a mortal deserved it, the answer went back to Judah at the fire.
The drawing kept collapsing. Nothing held until God made repentance and set it down beside the Throne, before there was any light to see it by.
Pharaoh told Egypt he was a god who felt no human needs. Every morning he went down to the Nile alone to keep it up. One morning Moses was standing there.
On his deathbed, Simeon confessed he had planned Joseph's murder in his heart and traced the same spirit back through Cain to the first morning of the world.
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.
He fed his sons, then told them he was dying. They did not believe him because he still looked strong. Then he told them about the sun and the broken ship.
Before Adam drew breath, God set four places apart. One of them was a mountain in the desert, already holy, already waiting for Moses.
Reuben lost it. Simeon and Levi burned through it. When the blessing reached Judah it arrived at a man already broken open by what he had done.
Each empire climbed the ladder and descended. The fourth climbed so high Jacob could no longer see the top and terror seized him until God spoke.
The sun went backward for Hezekiah. The Assyrian army died overnight outside Jerusalem. God had arranged everything. Then Hezekiah failed to sing.
The stone Jacob used as a pillow at Bethel was the stone from which God had spread all creation outward. Jacob's dream showed him what would be built there.
The news reached them on a Thursday. Rome had four of the great sages and wanted eight thousand students of Jerusalem as the price of their release.
Before the court woke, Pharaoh walked to the Nile alone. A god, he told Egypt, does not need a bathroom at dawn.
When Isaiah saw the divine throne and the seraphim singing, he did not sing with them. He spent years believing that silence had cost him everything.
The Book of Jubilees records that Rebekah's role was inscribed in heaven before she drew water from the well. What was written there also included a curse.
Abraham told God directly that he could see the problem in Esau. The bowl of lentil soup decades later was not a surprise to anyone who had been watching.
