79 myths · Page 2 of 3
When Lilith flew from Eden, God sent three angels after her. She refused to return. What she offered instead became the contract that still limits her power.
A tradition in Talmud and Kabbalah says Adam was not Cain's father. Samael seduced Eve in the Garden, and the murder of Abel was written into Cain's blood.
Samael did not tempt from outside the Garden. He entered. A folktale explains how the yetzer hara, the evil inclination, found its home in the human heart.
Ahaz had shut the study houses. The rooms went dark. Hezekiah ordered oil for every lamp and said the night would not stay empty.
Noah's skin shone white as snow at birth and his eyes lit up the room. His father Lamech ran to Methuselah convinced the child was not human.
Solomon used a ring inscribed with God's name to call every beast, bird, and demon to his table. Every creature came dancing. Then one did not appear.
The Zohar and Pirkei DeRabbi Eliezer agree on the origin of demons: God stopped creating before their bodies were finished. The Sabbath did not wait.
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.
At the Jabbok ford a figure grips Jacob until dawn. Tradition names him precisely: Samael, Esau's angel, the prosecutor of Israel.
The Messiah would not take him down. Joshua walked the seven chambers anyway. Solomon built the House over the same mouth and never went in.
Moses recited Psalm 91 on Sinai to ward off demons, and when the Mishkan rose, the noon demon Ketev Meriri lost dominion over the world.
She was a woman's head with no body, hair hanging wild. She told Solomon to wash his hands before he asked her name. He got up and washed.
The waters were gone, and the spirits were still loose. Noah's grandchildren sickened. He asked God to take the demons off the children.
After the Flood Noah prays against evil spirits, Mastema bargains to keep one tenth of them, and angels teach Noah remedies to fight back.
For seven mornings Moses put the Tent up. Every evening he took it apart. On the eighth the boards stayed, and the camp went quiet.
No iron could touch the Temple stones. Solomon needed a worm the size of a barley grain. The demon who knew its nest drank from one well.
She came through the gate in the dark with a food bag. At first light the town's men stood on the slope above the camp and did not go down.
Rabbi Meir taught that angels scale with precepts: one commandment kept earns one guardian. A thousand protect the left side and ten thousand protect the right.
Solomon binds Ashmedai with the Ineffable Name to get the shamir. After the Temple is built, Ashmedai borrows the royal ring and throws Solomon into exile.
A woman in a strange village pulled him aside. Eat nothing here, she said. The host was not a man, and the food would put a chain on him.
Three angels caught her at the sea and she would not go back to Adam. She swore to spare any child who wore their names. The rest she kept.
A dragon-demon immune to every blade can be slain only by its own blood, and on a night road a demon offers gold for one man's eternity.
The builder's son came to the quarry pale as tallow. His thumb would not close. Solomon closed the boy's fingers around a ring cut with the Name.
The princess did not tear his house down. She carried every broken oath to a court of human judges. Then she asked for one last kiss.
A ruined believer overhears demons boasting their secrets, while three other men face marble, a haunted tree, and a Shabbat spell.
Solomon set Beelzeboul and the powers of darkness to dig his Temple while Benaiah met a queen on the road and shone like the morning star.
Denounced for hiding twelve thousand students from the poll-tax, Rabbah ran through the marshes of Babylonia until heaven itself summoned him.
Hagag left the torn page under his heel and rode to hunt. In the thicket the deer stood up wearing his face and took the horse.
A nation that kindles a great stake at dawn and dusk meets the demon their fire was feeding, and Samriel opens the gate.
Summoned before Solomon's seal, a restless demon confesses it is what became of the Nephilim, and the wise king binds it to labor on his Temple.
