207 myths · Page 1 of 7
The Angel of Death, the journey of the soul after death, mourning, and the boundary between this world and the next.
207 myths on JewishMythology.com retell how Jewish tradition imagines death, 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.
Adam came back from the far paths of Eden to find an infant crying in the grass. He asked Eve whose child it was. She said it was the son of Samael.
Solomon needed a demon to build the Temple. He caught the king of demons with wine, used him, then kept him chained. The demon got his revenge.
Not everyone wanted to leave Egypt. The midrash says four-fifths of Israel died during the plague of darkness, hidden so Egypt would not rejoice.
The flame did not burn cloth or blacken skin. It went in through the nostrils and took the soul, leaving two bodies dressed for service, garments whole.
The animals went to drink and found stone. Moses was away from the camp, mourning his sister. He wept six hours before the thirsty crowd came for him.
For forty years the cloud stood over Moses. On his last day it rose from his tent and settled over Joshua's, and Moses watched it go.
God dug Moses's grave with His own hands and buried him on Mount Nebo. He hid it so well it appears in different places to different observers.
Aaron and Moses had not seen each other for decades. When they met in the wilderness, Aaron's joy was too large to speak.
Abraham kissed him seven times and blessed the God who had brought him out of Ur. Then he stretched out his feet and died, without waking the boy.
At the border he will never cross, Moses tells God that Adam broke one command and died, while he broke none. So why must he die too?
Samael came to take Moses and found him writing the Name of God. The angel's eyes went dark, he fell to his face, and still Moses refused.
Abraham took Isaac up the mountain, and a stranger came to Sarah's tent with a vision of the raised knife. She screamed once, and her soul left.
Every Torah scroll ends with Moses dying. The Talmud wrestled with who wrote those final words and how Moses could have done it.
Rebekah died with only the disgraced Esau free to walk at the head of her burial, so the family carried her body out at night.
God sent Michael to inform Abraham that his time had come. Michael went, came back to heaven, and asked God to find another way.
Methuselah asks his father what food he wants before he leaves the earth. Enoch says he lost his appetite when God anointed him and wants nothing of this world.
Eve begged to lie beside Adam, but only Seth had seen the grave. So an archangel came down to teach the first burial.
Granted one final wish by Heaven, Joshua ben Levi asked to see his place in Eden, then took the angel's knife and leaped over the wall alive.
Only two men came back down the hill. The camp asked Moses where his brother was, listened to the answer, and then bent down for stones.
Moses was a hundred and twenty and his eyes were still sharp. What had gone was the Torah. On his last morning the gates of wisdom shut in front of him.
A voice out of heaven gave him five hours. He spent them offering trades: wings, fins, a cloud, and finally his own body in pieces.
Genesis says Enoch walked with God, then vanished. The rabbis imagined a man too unstable for heaven to leave unfinished.
The Angel of Death came into the tent, and Moses spoke the Ineffable Name at him until he fled. On the third approach Moses met him with open hands.
After twenty-two years of mourning Joseph as dead, Jacob makes the long journey to Egypt and sits down to eat with him.
God ordered every gate in heaven shut, because the old man's prayer was cutting up through them like a sword and nothing could slow it down.
Moses wanted one of his sons to inherit the burden of leadership. God chose Joshua instead, then made Moses strengthen him in public.
God said do not eat. Eve told the serpent do not touch. The rabbis traced Eden's fall to that single addition and were not unsympathetic about it.
Before Moses died, he was shown the Temple burning and Israel in exile. He found Jeremiah on the roads to Babylon and walked alongside the dead.
Israel began mourning Moses before he died because his absence had already entered the camp. Thirty days made the loss visible.
A voice from heaven said Moses had one hour remaining. He asked to live as a bird, as a beast, anything that could cross the Jordan. God refused.
