11 myths
Ancient empires in Jewish memory: Babylon, Persia, Greece, and Rome as political powers, symbols of exile, and instruments in the drama of providence.
11 myths on JewishMythology.com retell how Jewish tradition imagines empires, 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.
After the Tower of Babel fell, Nimrod did not repent. He built four cities and named them after what God had done to him. Then he threw children into a furnace.
Vashti walked the women of the empire through the palace, naming rooms. The dining hall. The wine room. The bedchamber. She was dressed as the high priest.
He had silenced the earth, lifted his heart, and taken the ends of the world. Then he fell into bed in Babylon and gave everything away.
A woman went into labor in the brickyard at Shinar. She gave birth where she stood, tied the baby against her body with a sheet, and kept working.
Moses said let my people go ten times. Joshua raised a javelin at Ai. Belshazzar locked the palace doors and then could not get out himself.
Arpachshad built towers a hundred cubits above his gates, and they did not save him. Then Nebuchadnezzar sent envoys west, and the nations laughed at them.
Assyria boasts of taking the world like eggs from an unguarded nest. One night an angel empties the camp; later sons kill Sennacherib at Dagon's door.
An empty treasury meets a wordless lesson of radishes while Esau's sword and Jacob's limp stage the long pageant of empire and exile.
In Rome, Rabbi Joshua locked himself in with a matron, then walked Hadrian past temples and latrines to explain God's missing Name.
Rabbi Yehudah ha-Nasi pulled old trees for young ones before the emperor, teaching power without a word that walls could hear.
Hadrian told three philosophers he wished to make himself a god. Their tests, and his wife's question about his own soul, stopped the project.
