185 myths · Page 3 of 7
Kings sought out women of Asher as wives. The sages say those women used their position to plead for people already condemned to die.
Before the stone left David's sling, something older and stranger had already struck Goliath. The giant felt it the moment David walked toward him.
David once asked God what madness was good for. God said the day would come when he would beg for it. He was right.
David's sin with Bathsheba was real. The rabbis did not look away. But they also asked why God would allow the most righteous king to fall this far.
Absalom spent years building his plot against his father. It began not with weapons but with a letter bearing the king's own seal.
David ordered a count of Israel. Joab begged him to stop. The census went forward, and seventy thousand people died before it ended.
Solomon asked if anyone surpassed him in the world. The ant queen would not answer unless he held her first. Then she told him yes.
Nineveh's king ordered children separated from nursing mothers and animals from their young. The sound of the city crying out together could not be dismissed.
A man in Nineveh pulled down his own house to return one stolen brick. Then two men found gold in a field and spent weeks refusing it.
Ahaz closed the schools first, then sealed the Temple doors. He changed his clothes and took the long way around any street where Isaiah stood.
Two elders condemned a righteous woman with false testimony. A young man with no standing interrupted and asked each elder which tree they had stood under.
Before casting the lot, Haman interrogated each sign of the zodiac. Every constellation gave him the same answer: do not touch Israel.
Haman told the king's advisors the God who split the sea was senile now. His evidence was the ruins of the Temple and the silence of heaven.
Persians in Shushan had begun telling Jews the date. Mordecai stopped three children walking home from school and asked what they had learned.
When Mordecai called the fast, he skipped every Jewish precedent and quoted Jonah's Nineveh word for word. His people were stunned.
When the decree went out, Mordecai did not weep quietly. He pressed the covenant like a creditor, demanding God answer for the oath sworn to the patriarchs.
Esther had the king's ear and said nothing. She invited Haman to dinner instead. Then she invited him again. The sages debated her strategy for centuries.
Every man in Susa bowed when Haman rode past. One man at the gate stuck out his knee instead, so that Haman could read what was written on it.
The king lay awake convinced he was being poisoned. When that fear passed, a worse one took its place. His paranoia would save the Jewish people.
The king asked what a deserving man should receive. Haman assumed the question was about him and answered in detail. He was wrong.
Haman found Mordecai deep in Torah study and told him to rise. Then he confessed that Mordecai's prayers had defeated his ten thousand talents of silver.
Watching from a window as Haman led the honored man through the street, his daughter grabbed a chamber pot to throw on Mordecai. She had the wrong man.
After leading Mordecai through the streets, Haman came home in mourning. His wife and advisors did not comfort him. They delivered a verdict.
When Esther pointed at the enemy who had condemned her people, her arm began moving toward the king. An angel corrected the aim.
Jewish law says a hanged body must come down before dark. Haman and his ten sons stayed up there, and the scholars lost the argument.
When Saul lost divine favor, the watcher angels shifted roles. Their change from observers to enforcers was the first sign that his protection was gone.
The doorposts were still shaking when he decided he was a dead man. Then one of the burning ones came down at him carrying a pair of tongs.
The sailors on Jonah's ship were not cruel men. They tried their idols, cast lots, jettisoned their cargo, and rowed for shore before they touched him.
Two young women met at the well in Sodom. One of them was starving. What the other one did about it brought the fire down on the whole city.
She was twelve and she was being held in the prince's house when she overheard what the men downstairs were planning to do to her family.
