124 myths · Page 2 of 5
The Torah lists Esau's kings one after another, fourteen of them, and Jacob felt small next to that column. God told him to turn and look behind him.
A tyrant killed seven sons one by one for refusing an idol. Their mother answered Abraham with seven altars before heaven replied.
Terah found the shop in pieces and a hatchet in the biggest idol's fist. His son said the large one had fought the others for the meat.
Absalom took the city and David went up the hill barefoot. Near the top he stopped walking, and the friend who caught him there offered him no comfort.
Moses parted the sea, drew water from rock, and fed a nation on bread from the sky. The people ran out of faith again within days of each miracle.
David and Job watched the wicked thrive and nearly lost their footing. Their anger became the song that kept faith alive.
Abraham's father sent him out to sell idols. Abraham turned the shop into a courtroom and made every buyer doubt his god.
Famine opened the road to Egypt. Isaac packed. In the night a voice forbade the Nile and sent him into Philistine ground instead.
Potiphar's wife swore to make every man in Egypt hate Joseph. She had him flogged and imprisoned. Joseph prayed from the pit, and the answer took a decade.
Gabriel offered to go down and cool the furnace himself. God turned him down, gave a reason, and promised him three men in Babylon instead.
Bereshit Rabbah compared God searching for Abraham to a king sifting piles of dust for a lost gem. Twenty generations of dust. One gem, gleaming.
The rabbis compared Abraham to a vessel struck by a potter. Ten times the tests hit him hard, and still his faith rang true.
Sarah packed him a fine garment and a turban with a stone in it, and told Abraham not to let the boy walk or sit in the sun.
Figs and olives and mountain water met Abraham in Canaan. None of it was his. He asked God how a childless man could inherit a country.
The butler tied a knot in his sash so he would remember the prisoner. An angel came and undid it, and two more years went by.
In the cave he said the same words twice. First, that he not fall into the enemy's hand. Then, that the enemy not fall into his.
Ten spies saw the same Canaan and came back broken. Two saw the same land and held. Ben Sira says it was the greatest act of faithfulness in Israel's history.
An officer stood up at the war council and told Holofernes the truth. No army can beat the Jews while they keep faith. They lose only when they sin.
Jonathan the Maccabee tears his clothes in the dirt while his army flees. David walks onto a field no one sent him to. Both win the same way.
The priests laid a bullock and ten barrels of wine before Bel each night. By morning the table was bare, and Daniel asked for ashes on the floor.
Zuleika covered her idol before approaching Joseph. He answered with five refusals, each one built for a room where power had closed the door.
Abraham was a trained Chaldean astrologer. One night he sat watching the sky to predict the rain and talked himself out of the entire profession.
The king of Sodom offered Abram every pack from the war. Abram would not take a thread. That night he still had no son of his own.
Abraham's final words in Jubilees are quiet and total. No miracles listed. Just a man at 175 saying he remembered God every single day and never broke his word.
Two judges swore they had caught her with a man under a tree in her own garden. The court believed them. A boy in the crowd asked which tree.
Most of the camp walked off when they finished counting. Eight hundred stayed. Judah looked for the right wing and went at it anyway.
Judah Maccabee defeated four Seleucid generals in sequence, each time outnumbered. After the first battle he took Apollonius's sword and never put it down.
Seventy thousand newborn boys were dead by Nimrod's order. Emtelai bore her son alone in a cave. She kissed him and walked back to the city without him.
When an old woman told Nimrod to his face that he was a liar who denied God, she was executed. But the people kept following Abraham's teachings anyway.
Terah had reported his own son to the king. Three days later Abraham walked out of the fire, cords burned off, the governors flat on the ground.
