13 myths
Myths, legends, and mystical writings about Destruction from across Jewish tradition.
13 myths on JewishMythology.com retell how Jewish tradition imagines destruction, 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.
The kings of Sodom fled their lost war straight into the boiling tar of Siddim, a sinking that foreshadowed the plain melting like a snail.
The fire that fell on Sodom from the sky had a partner rising from Gehinnom beneath. Both were prepared before the world began.
The angels sent to destroy Sodom were angels of mercy. The city burned because every form of mercy it was offered, it refused.
Before fire fell on Sodom, a patriarch issued a desperate last warning to his sons. Jubilees records both the warning and the silence that followed.
Before fire and brimstone fell on Sodom, God sent blessing rain. The people looked at the showers and decided God was not watching. Then the sulfur came.
Jerusalem falls in 70 CE. The high priest's daughter is put up for sale. A rich man starves in the siege with gold still in his hands.
Forty years of omens precede the Temple's fall, a prophet's blood boils for centuries naming its killers, and Nero reads his own verdict and runs.
After the First Temple fell, Jeremiah was sent to wake Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Moses from their rest. He could not make himself tell them the truth.
While Jeremiah prayed in Jerusalem the city stood. When he went to Benjamin the protection lifted. He returned to walk into exile beside the captives.
Climbing toward the ruins, Jeremiah finds a woman weeping on the mountaintop, and her grief turns out to be the city he came to mourn.
Nakdimon staked his fortune on twelve wells of water returning before sunset, then prayed until the clouds came and the sun turned back.
A sage escapes in a coffin, the dew stops blessing the earth, a pig appears on the siege wall, and the Levites hang their harps on Babylonian willows.
Roman soldiers eat the wedding birds and a rebellion ignites. Bar Deroa holds the army off until he says God forgot them. Then a snake finishes it.
