96 myths · Page 3 of 4
Rabbi Joshua ben Levi descended through all seven chambers of Gehinnom and returned. Solomon never went himself, but he sent his workforce there instead.
A demon was draining the life of a child on Solomon's Temple site. Solomon got a ring from the archangel Michael and built his entire workforce from it.
Solomon needs the Shamir worm to cut the Temple stones without iron, so he sends Benaiah to capture Ashmedai king of demons, and later pays a terrible price.
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 vampire-spirit drinks the life from Solomon's young builder to stall the Temple, until the king turns the night-creature into his own catalog of demons.
A chained Ashmedai read every stranger on the road like a sealed verdict, then clawed a two-headed man out of the ground to outsee a king.
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.
A proud king tears the verse that names his fall from the holy book, and a demon in deerskin rides home to sit on his abandoned throne.
In the generation the Messiah comes the sky splits, seraphim pour down fire, the stars fall, and the earth shakes as judgment arrives by sword and flame.
Three winds God walled shut, but the fourth He left open, a dare to every false god and a doorway for the demons, quakes, and thunder that wait.
David composed his greatest psalms while demonic forces circled him at night. The rabbis read Psalm 18 as a battlefield dispatch, not a metaphor.
Moses recited Psalm 91 for one hundred twenty days, and the day the Tabernacle rose, Rabbi Yochanan heard the verb for finished mean annihilated.
Susanna was already walking toward her execution when a young man stepped out of the crowd and said he was innocent of her blood.
Denounced for hiding twelve thousand students from the poll-tax, Rabbah ran through the marshes of Babylonia until heaven itself summoned him.
Lilith crossed a night road hunting a birthing mother, but Elijah stood in her path and bound her hunger with an oath by the Name.
Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai needed Rome to rescind its decrees against Israel. His ally was Ashmedai, king of the demons.
In Rome a marble statue waits that was not made by human hands, and when the end of days nears, a figure born from it will claim the title of redeemer.
Jewish demonology places Lilith on a throne in a distant dark kingdom, beautiful and violent, with daughters who move through sleep and shadow.
The Testament of Solomon records how Israel's king used a ring from Michael to force demons one by one to confess what they do and what defeats them.
When Rome banned Shabbat, circumcision, and purity, the sages sent Rabbi Shimon bar Yohai to Rome with a demon as their only ally.
Berakhot 6a says demons press against every person by the thousands, leaving evidence in sore feet, worn clothes, and the crush of the study hall.
A ruined believer overhears demons boasting their secrets, while three other men face marble, a haunted tree, and a Shabbat spell.
A demon in his shade tree offers a pious man daily coins to spare its home, but he swings the axe and unearths a hoard that owes him nothing.
Samael and Lilith are generated back to back at creation, bound together but pulled apart by jealousy, twin powers of darkness never fully joined.
Every shofar blast on Rosh Hashanah is a weapon aimed at Lilith and a demonic coalition assembled in the heavenly court against Israel.
Isaiah's locked declaration, 'My glory I shall not give to another,' names that other as Samael. He can damage the vessel. He cannot steal what it holds.
Kabbalistic texts describe Lilith not as a liberated woman but as a force of cosmic unmaking, bound to Samael and thirsting for what Eden cost her.
The richest miser in town took no fee for circumcisions. One night a carriage came, and the road left the ordinary world entirely.
A father's warning about the unguarded cradle draws on Lilith's oldest story, from Eden's exile to the prophet's confrontation on the road.
In the months of Tammuz and Av, a psalm about protection becomes a map of demons that own the daylight heat and the moonlit dark.
