438 myths · Page 5 of 15
After the golden calf, God said He would send an angel instead of coming Himself. The people heard it, took off their ornaments, and never put them back on.
Jochebed was 130 years old when she conceived Moses. Her body returned to youth overnight, and her son was born in six months.
Moses refused to bring the plagues of blood, frogs, and lice himself. The river had once carried his basket, and he would not repay it with a rod.
Two famous non-Israelite figures stood in Pharaoh's palace when hail struck Egypt. One believed the warning. One did not.
Two hundred thousand Ephraimites left Egypt thirty years early, fought the Philistines, and died. Their bones became Ezekiel's valley.
The Egyptian army was closing in, and the people at the water were picking up pearls. The river Pishon had washed them out of Eden.
Amalek came from the far south and covered sixteen hundred miles in a single night, driven by a grudge that ran back to Esau and Jacob in the womb.
A woman went into labor while she was treading mortar for Pharaoh. The child came out into the brick mold, and an angel came down for the mold.
Clouds flew to the river Pishon at Eden's border and gathered onyx stones for Aaron's breastplate before Israel built the Tabernacle.
When Aaron's staff swallowed the staffs of Pharaoh's magicians, the rabbis said the real miracle was not the serpents. It was dead wood consuming dead wood.
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.
An old man hung merchants' scales in front of the throne, put every noble in Egypt in one pan and a baby goat in the other, and the goat went down.
When Miriam led the women at the Red Sea, she had a tambourine ready. She packed it in Egypt while Pharaoh's army lived and the plagues were still running.
At the Red Sea, Israel and Egypt looked alike to strict justice. God split the water not because Israel was worthy but because an oath outranked merit.
Every nation heard about the Exodus and trembled. Jethro heard it and packed up and walked toward it. The Midrash says that difference was everything.
Exodus names a nameless angel in the flame. The Targum Pseudo-Jonathan gave him a name, Zagnugael, and split the Burning Bush into two voices.
Esau told his grandson he had failed to kill Jacob and left him the job. Watch for the stumble, he said. That is the only opening you get.
Pharaoh broke out in sores, and his doctors told him to bathe in the blood of Hebrew children. He signed the order for three hundred a day.
Rabbah bar Bar Hannah follows a desert guide into the wilderness and finds the generation of the Exodus lying whole, vast, and still.
God told Moses to turn the Nile to blood. Moses refused. No man drinks from a well and then throws a stone down into it.
Joseph's deathbed password reaches Moses, Levi lives long enough to see the deliverer born, and Jethro hears of the mountain of glory before Moses arrives.
Nine hundred million destroying angels descended with God over Egypt. The morning host was already singing when God looked down and threw fire at the sea.
An archangel calls Moses up, the tablets are cut from the throne's sapphire floor, and the glory he glimpses is the knot of God's tefillin, prayer straps.
Pharaoh rides into the sea with horses and iron, and God answers every weapon in Pharaoh's own language before the waters close.
Moses walked out of the throne room burning. He had just told Pharaoh that the king's own servants would come and beg him to leave.
Six months in the womb, then three months hidden in the house. By the time Egypt came looking for a newborn boy, the child was already a season old.
Moses writes God's Name on poisonous oleander and throws it into bitter water. Weeks later, heaven drops bread stored there since the first week of creation.
Israel leaves Egypt with kneading troughs but no food planned, and God remembers that trust as the love of a bride following into untilled land.
Two words in the Song at the Sea fight each other. One says God hurled the chariots down. The other says He lifted them. Both are right, in that order.
Egyptian soldiers drove oxen across the ground where the infants were hidden. Once the men had gone, the children came up out of the field like grass.
