279 myths · Page 9 of 10
The elders peeled away before they reached the palace. Pharaoh's judgment was staged carefully, and the first stage fell on the wrong men.
Each tribe's flag matched Aaron's breastplate stone. Korach argued that oil rises and he did not. The generation at Moab inherited what Egypt never could.
Pharaoh ordered two midwives to drown every Hebrew boy. They refused, lied to his face, and one of them later cradled the child his family renamed ten times.
Egyptian women carried their own infants into Hebrew homes to flush out hidden newborns. The same fear of the enemy later shrank twelve spies to grasshoppers.
Pharaoh sneers at two old Hebrew men and their God. From that moment he is keeping a calendar he cannot read and will not survive.
The people of Israel in Egypt have almost nothing to their credit. God comes running anyway, vaulting every obstacle, too impatient to wait.
At the sea's edge, Pharaoh's mocking words turned back on him word by word, each insult forecasting the fate he was riding toward.
Before striking the Egyptian, Moses consults the angels and waits for their verdict; years later he refuses an angel as guide and demands God instead.
The east wind God sent to split the Red Sea was the same wind that had killed every rebellious generation before Egypt. Then every water on earth tore open.
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.
Pharaoh thought he was chasing slaves. He was carrying Israel's treasury to them on the backs of his horses, and the sea knew it.
Amram divorced his wife so no son of his would drown, and all Israel followed. Then his small daughter told him his decree was worse than Pharaoh's.
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 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.
Moses scratched the hour on Pharaoh's wall and named the only storm to match it, the hail that would one day bury Gog in fire.
On Mount Nebo, the land Moses could not enter opened like a scroll, and he watched Barak, David, and Joshua rise out of its hills.
Moses's blessing for Judah seemed addressed to a future danger. The rabbis traced it to one terrifying moment at the Red Sea when Judah jumped in first.
On the plains of Moab, Moses turns geography into rebuke, hiding ten failures of the wilderness years inside a string of place names.
When all the kings of Canaan allied to destroy Israel crossing the Jordan, Joshua prayed. The Mekhilta says the result was identical to the Red Sea.
The tribes argued at the Red Sea over who would enter first. Benjamin did not wait for the argument to finish. Judah threw stones at them. God rewarded both.
From the Exodus to the Temple's dedication, God appeared four distinct times. Each appearance answered a different crisis in a different mode.
Jochebed was 130 years old when she conceived Moses. Her body returned to youth overnight, and her son was born in six months.
Two famous non-Israelite figures stood in Pharaoh's palace when hail struck Egypt. One believed the warning. One did not.
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.
Two hundred thousand Ephraimites left Egypt thirty years early, fought the Philistines, and died. Their bones became Ezekiel's valley.
While Pharaoh's army closed in from behind, the Israelites were gathering pearls and precious stones that the river Pishon had carried out of Eden.
