438 myths · Page 7 of 15
The quail were still in their mouths when the plague hit. The Mekhilta reads the wilderness to learn how God measures punishment against the size of a sin.
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.
The sea drowned Pharaoh and then paid Israel in gems every morning. Moses dragged them away from the treasure, and behind them all Egypt wailed one word.
When Moses died, heaven's bread fed Israel thirty-nine more days. His silver trumpets disappeared before Joshua could touch them.
A king lost three caravans to the serpents of Shur and a woodcutter lost his hair to one glance, yet slaves and infants crossed the same waste untouched.
Egypt was still owed 314 years of slave labor, Uzza argued. He asked God to send Michael to argue back, and God agreed to hear the case.
God orders Rahab to swallow the waters of creation. He refuses and is slain, and then the sea and the earth quarrel over who must take the dead.
Pharaoh's daughter reaches for the ark in the reeds, her maidens block her in the name of the decree, and Gabriel strikes them down.
Rabbi Eliezer would not retract it. A nameless slave at the split sea beheld more of God than the greatest prophets ever glimpsed.
Two sages traced the dark that pinned Egypt to the blackness God hides behind, a coin-thick scoop of the deep that doubled once it was loosed.
Past the divided sea lay a waste of serpents thick as olive-press beams, where a king lost three caravans and a woodcutter lost all his hair.
As a she-wolf nursed the twins who would wall Rome, Pharaoh tightened the yoke on Israel, and two cities climbed on one dark clock.
The elders slipped away one by one until only two brothers faced a fortress of four hundred gates and lions, and an angel walked them in.
Pharaoh turned the Nile into a grave for Hebrew sons, but the river spat the infants back onto the sand, where God fed them milk and oil from the rock.
At the sea a freed nation sang until the mountains leapt. Out of Jerusalem the same people wept in chains, every mercy turned to ruin.
Firstborn sons stormed the palace with swords and pleas. Pharaoh beat them back. At exact midnight God walked Egypt without a guide.
Moses hid the body in the sand. The next day two Hebrews were quarreling, and one of them asked whether he meant to kill them too.
At the sea Egypts angel pled innocence and wages already paid. Gabriel raised a brick-mold from the bondage, and judgment sat down.
On the night death walked Egypt, Pharaoh wandered the streets weeping for Moses, while Hebrew boys misled the king who no longer knew where his slaves slept.
One frog croaked and an army answered, marble cracked on command, and Pharaoh finally suffered in his own body what blood in the Nile had left untouched.
After the tenth plague, Pharaoh forced gold into Hebrew hands and left corpses unburied in his haste. At the sea, fire took the chariot wheels next.
Rabbi Yoshiyah counted four clouds of glory around the camp. Before, behind, above, and underfoot, Israel walked inside a moving shelter of Presence.
When Hebrew men divorced their wives to spare unborn sons from the Nile, Amram remarried Jochebed in public so despair would not erase Israel.
The crowd made the metal bull move and bellow, then told the judges to call it God. The judges said no, and the crowd killed them for it.
Rabbi Yishmael put the mark on the inside of the doorframe. No neighbor could count the painted houses, and no Egyptian ever saw one.
God told the ground to bury Egypt's drowned. The ground answered that the water had done the killing and could do the burying, and demanded an oath.
Ganoon claimed private revelation and led Ephraim out of Egypt too soon. Two hundred thousand fell. Bows turned back in battle.
An Egyptian priest named Manetho wrote that a king had to drive out 80,000 sick men to see the gods. Josephus read the story and called it a lie.
At the bush Moses asked God to send someone else. God sent him anyway, and eighty-year-old Moses walked Egypt into plagues and a split sea.
Dying, Jacob ordered Joseph to forgive and shield his brothers. Ages later the tribes buried Joseph in Shechem, the ground that first took him.
