247 myths · Page 8 of 9
A mother chooses wicker over wood for her son's basket. A staff cut from sapphire waits in a garden. A calf law turns out to be about a people.
Six hundred and thirteen commandments, 611 of them through one man's throat. Moses refuses to touch a single coin of public money without a witness.
A woman dark from the sun, a bridegroom calling from the mountains. The rabbis cracked the poem open and found Egypt, circumcision, and the Red Sea.
Frogs cracked Egypt's marble floors, darkness gained weight and pinned people in place, and Egypt's own cunning became the water that drowned it.
Pharaoh laughed at the staff that swallowed his magicians' sticks, then ash traveled forty days' distance, and boils arrived that no physician could drain.
Pharaoh declared he would pursue and overtake and divide the spoil. The Yalkut Shimoni shows how each boast became the sentence he pronounced against himself.
The Song of the Sea drowns Egypt three different ways. Straw, stone, and lead were not poetry but verdicts, each weight matched to its guilt.
Israel bred faster than scorpions and filled every corner of Egypt. Then at the sea a single pillar of cloud held two armies a hand's breadth apart all night.
Egypt's sorcerers could copy blood and frogs but failed at lice. From that single admitted finger the rabbis traced the whole open hand of Israel's rescue.
Ten plagues struck Egypt. Then the rabbis did the arithmetic on the sea and the number kept climbing, fifty, two hundred, two hundred and fifty.
Aaron walked into the Holy of Holies alone on Yom Kippur. One Hebrew word connected his dread to David's psalm and changed what both texts meant.
A well followed Israel forty years in the desert. The Talmud named whose merit sustained it. The morning after Miriam died the people found nothing to drink.
Abraham stands under uncountable stars and hears a promise no census can contain. Generations later his children fill the wilderness and exceed all numbers.
At Shiloh, Hannah pushed her portion away and wept before the altar. Her tears were her bread, and her grief became the meal that fed her.
Three days of total darkness fell over Egypt. The Targum says God used that blackness to let the Israelites bury their wicked dead before Pharaoh could see.
Pharaoh marked the men fated to die and shipped them off to build Solomon's Temple. Solomon sent them home wearing the shrouds Pharaoh planned to bury them in.
Judah cast a four-hundred-shekel stone toward the sky and crushed it to dust. Joseph nodded to Manasseh, who picked up another stone and matched him.
Pharaoh warned Josiah to step aside and let the Egyptian army pass. Josiah quoted Moses and refused. He was struck by three hundred arrows before nightfall.
Pharaoh's fleet was sailing north to break the siege. Then God filled the water with drowned Egyptian ancestors, and the fleet turned back.
Ezekiel's crude phrase about Egypt became, in Vayikra Rabbah, a lesson about trees, Abraham's covenant, and the danger of forgetting what is marked on the body.
Jasher gave Joseph seventy languages overnight and seventy steps to prove it. The Exodus Pharaoh survived the sea and ruled Nineveh.
Most people think the Red Sea left Egypt behind. A second-century rabbi says Israel carried something through the water Moses had to strip away.
The Tikkunei Zohar layers Jonah's fish with Egypt, Lilith, the spleen, and the angel of destruction who followed Israel out of bondage.
Nimrod lit a furnace in Casdim and nine hundred thousand came to watch Abram burn. The grasshopper climbed the trellis. Then it fell.
Esau waits for his father to die. Pharaoh counts a swarming people. Haman seals a letter to kill every Jew in one day. Each plot is smarter. Each fails.
Jealous of every nation's quiet, Israel flung its anger at heaven, then remembered the night a slaughtered lamb in Egypt saved a terrified people.
Israel drank God's hard wine in Egypt and trembled under it. Then they called out in every divine name they knew, and the sea ran away from them.
Twenty-six generations pass before Israel earns the word Hallelujah, speaking it first not in safety but in Egypt's last terrible night.
A dying Pharaoh begs his heir to honor Joseph, but throne after throne forgets the debt until the law itself decrees Hebrew sons drowned.
Joseph's brothers sold him, ate, and sealed their secret. The debt returned through Esther's danger and Joshua's torn clothes.
