436 myths · Page 4 of 15
A wick of fire burned inside each hailstone. Egyptians cut meat from fallen cattle, and birds tore it from their hands on the road home.
Egypt's ram stood tied at an Israelite door for four days, where every neighbor could count it. The knife came on the fourteenth.
Two tribes were already in the waves. God turned on Moses, who was still praying, and told him to lift the rod over the water.
Fifty thousand men crossed the Jordan to fight for land they would never live on. When they went home and built an altar, Israel armed against them.
A hand closed on the Name at his shoulder. He pulled. The angel pulled. By morning the camp stood in ordinary cloth.
Mothers ran with lamps into rooms that had gone quiet. The king who signed the Nile decree still had breath in his chest.
Three days after the sea split, Israel met water it could not drink and learned that confession can sweeten a bitter world.
Israel did not believe because Aaron made signs in Egypt. They believed when his mouth carried the phrase Joseph had buried in memory.
Every morning Pharaoh stood at the riverbank and said the Nile was his, that he had made it. Aaron's snake ate the magicians' snakes, then went back to wood.
Pharaoh thought he was releasing slaves. His advisors catalogued what walked out, wise men, artisans, wealth, an orchard of pomegranates.
Moses warned Pharaoh before each plague. Ten warnings, ten refusals. Jubilees says the plagues were not punishment alone but a debt paid to Abraham.
Joseph's last prophecy named the oppression ahead and the deliverance after it. His only condition was that his brothers carry his bones when they left Egypt.
Judah's last words listed the lion he killed barehanded and the bear he flung off a cliff. Levi told his sons to teach their children to read the Torah.
Pharaoh did not enslave Israel with chains. He did it with wages, flattery, and a shovel pressed into the hands of a willing king.
At a night lodging on the road to Egypt, God came for Moses. Zipporah grabbed a flint knife and did what needed doing before anyone else understood the danger.
Israel had planted Egypt's orchards for years. Moses scratched a line on the palace wall. When the sun hit it, the hail came.
Rachel was treading clay for bricks when her labor came. The child dropped into the mud and sank. An angel went down after it.
Pharaoh drove his own chariot toward Israel. Samael had already added six hundred supernatural chariots to lead the Egyptian vanguard.
Tabor still had dry shoulders from the Flood. God sent the tall peaks home and chose the small one that had torn itself from Moriah.
Two hundred seventy-three firstborn sons had no Levite to stand for them. Moses put slips in an urn so no father could cry that the count was fixed.
Two men were lurking near the palace walls. Solomon put on servant's clothes, introduced himself, said he had a key, and proposed a robbery.
Egypt's envoys reached the camp at Ramses and said the three days were up. The argument lasted about a minute before somebody drew.
Israel stood with water ahead and chariots behind. Moses kept praying. God told him the sea would not wait on a longer speech.
Jethro had already paid for leaving his own gods before he arrived in the wilderness, and what he saw when he watched Moses judge all day frightened him.
A crying child in a basket on the Nile became the redeemer of Israel. The rabbis followed the water from Pharaoh's river to Miriam's well to the desert clouds.
Israel crossed the sea, watched Egypt drown, and sang. Then they asked whether God was really among them. Amalek came the next moment.
On the first Passover night, Israel ate and sang in their houses while Egypt screamed over the firstborn. The rabbis preserved both sounds at once.
The rabbis could not agree whether Pharaoh drowned at the Red Sea or walked out to rule Nineveh as a witness to God's power.
Moses prays 515 times at the Jordan's edge, draws a circle in the dust, and prays until heaven trembles. God finally says: enough, do not continue.
Slaves cried from the brickfields of Egypt. A shepherd appeared among the cherubim. The last fire filled a house so thick the priests could not stand.
