14 myths
Myths, legends, and mystical writings about Divine Judgment from across Jewish tradition.
14 myths on JewishMythology.com retell how Jewish tradition imagines divine judgment, 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.
He had lied to her three times and escaped three times. On the fourth asking, he was exhausted and told her everything she needed to destroy him.
Pharaoh told Egypt he was a god who felt no human needs. Every morning he went down to the Nile alone to keep it up. One morning Moses was standing there.
Two thousand scorpions crossed the backs of the sinners, each sting matched to a different sin. Higher up, angels bathed in a river of fire and came out new.
A scoffer mocks a sage's promise of pearl gates thirty cubits high, until a storm drags him to where the angels are cutting them.
A man stood under a tree on the far bank, looking at nothing. He never saw the frog swimming toward him, or the passenger balanced dry on its back.
Nebuchadnezzar wanted the heights of the clouds. He got grass. His hair matted, his nails curled into claws, and the beasts bit him as one of their own.
Before the first man drew breath, a green band bled darkness, drowned stones fed the deep, and the fire of judgment already burned beneath the young world.
God folded the festival robe away when Israel sinned, and takes it up only on the day the avenging angels storm forth with His sword of fire and ice.
Heaven had sentenced the world to erasure, and when the scalding rain fell the giants of Noah's generation charged the ark and clawed for a seam.
For eighteen years a heavenly voice drives the king of Babylon to burn the Temple, and his bone cup and the exiles' empty skins call down judgment.
Before God strikes any nation on earth, His night court throws down that people's guardian-prince in heaven, and the kingdom falls by morning.
Two kidneys whisper good and evil counsel to the heart, and when justice comes they testify while the soul begs not to be gathered with the wicked.
One of the delegates at the gate held a boy by the wrist. Rams, jars of oil, a firstborn son if that was the price. The boy was looking at the fire.
At Sinai the angel of death lost his claim on Israel. Forty days later the calf rose and the second half of the verse gave his sword back.
