471 myths · Page 9 of 16
The rabbis say Adam's body waited silent through all of creation, was stamped from a single mold, and first walked with a second face at his back.
On Friday night, two angels walk home with you from synagogue, one good, one accusing, and which one speaks first depends on what they find inside.
A rabbi asks how creation began and receives the answer in a whisper: God put on light like a garment and shook snow beneath the throne.
The first day of the week had the second. The third had the fourth. The fifth had the eve. The seventh counted them off and found itself standing alone.
Pharaoh rides into the sea with horses and iron, and God answers every weapon in Pharaoh's own language before the waters close.
Rest on the seventh day is a sign between God and Israel. A man who picks up a tool in the street tears the sign, so the Torah puts him to death.
Moses turns to earth, sun, moon, and stars to plead for mercy, but each answers that it too must die, and creation cannot hold back God's decree.
On the second day the lower waters wept and would not split. The sky was three fingers thick. An angel sang about Sinai, and the waters went quiet.
A king fought seventy nations, and the way to tell who had won was to see whose men still held weapons. Israel holds a lulav (palm branch) and an etrog
God calls Moses through his father's voice at the burning bush so the first prophet will not be shattered. Moses hides his face. Awe arrives before the mission.
A mystic begs to see how something came from nothing. Tikkunei Zohar answers with a measuring line in primordial air and the tiny Yod that begins everything.
God dictated the words let us make man, and Moses stopped writing. Heretics will read that and claim there are two powers, he said.
God carried Adam over the whole earth, pointing out where to plant and where to sow. He was still out there when the serpent got Eve alone.
Three sounds cross the world from end to end though human ears cannot hold them. The loudest is the sound of a soul leaving the body.
Adam stands under a divine image that hovers but does not fully enter him. The tzelem protects, guards, and descends by careful measure.
Before the world began, the letters fought to be first. Generations later, humans shot arrows at heaven. The arrows came back covered in blood.
Rabbi Huna saw God at a potter's wheel, still working after creation. The clay yields or resists based on your direction. Eve arrived in twenty-four jewels.
The angels wanted to know what the new creature would be like. God told them about the righteous who would come out of him and left out the other half.
Students found one letter changed in Rabbi Meir's scroll. Very good had become good is death. The rabbis argued the limits of creation were its real structure.
The upper waters floated on God's ongoing voice. The sixth day borrowed time from Shabbat. Rain did not fall until Adam stood and prayed for it to begin.
God writes Abraham into the blueprint at creation, then waits twenty generations for him to show up outside Sodom and start counting down.
God took fire in one hand and water in the other and pressed them together until they held. Then a human body stretched across the whole sky.
A Greek philosopher, a childless patriarch, and a foreign king each try to make God smaller. Every time, the rabbis raise the ceiling.
Cedars cracked and the hills ran. Houses filled with light that had no lamp behind it. The nations went looking for Balaam to ask what was coming.
Pharaoh had his advisers go through every oath the God of the Hebrews had sworn, looking for a gap. They found one. They chose the river.
A king moved tenants with no voices into his new palace, and every morning they greeted him with their fingers and a lifted kerchief.
After the Golden Calf, Moses holds stone carved by human hands. Devarim Rabbah says God signed it with the word that begins and ends all creation.
Adam stood in the river Gihon with the water up to his neck for a hundred and thirty years, waiting to hear whether the court had finished with him.
The sentence against the first man was handed down on a Friday. It was not carried out until Saturday night, and he spent the day in between shining.
Earth pulled itself to the gate before heaven could look lazy, and Ben Zoma stared at the gap between waters until the world took him.
