21 myths
Famine and scarcity in Jewish tradition, from the seven years in Egypt to the siege of Jerusalem and the miracles that sustained Israel.
21 myths on JewishMythology.com retell how Jewish tradition imagines famine, drawn from the Hebrew Bible, Midrash, Talmud, Kabbalah, and later Jewish literature. Each story below synthesizes primary sources into a single narrative; follow any myth to read it, and from there into the source passages behind it.
Jubilees named every river boundary for Noah's grandsons and counted the exact year Pharaoh's wise men failed his dream. Both were scripture.
Joseph prayed for the Ishmaelites hauling him into slavery. Then he trusted a butler over God and paid with two extra years in prison.
Joseph chained Simeon in front of his brothers, then ordered good food sent to the cell as soon as they left. The cruelty and the care were the same plan.
On the night before Joseph appeared before Pharaoh, the angel Gabriel taught him all seventy languages in the world. By morning, he needed them all.
At 930, Adam called his children close as sickness entered the world. Seth offered Paradise fruit, and Eve begged to share the pain.
Terah married twice in the years Mastema's ravens stripped the fields bare. The hungry world he survived was the one he passed on to Abraham.
Before Pharaoh's men came for Sarah, Abraham dreamed it: a cedar, a palm tree, and men with axes. The palm tree spoke and saved the cedar.
The soup was real. So was the hunger. But Jubilees and the Midrash say Esau traded away his burial place beside the patriarchs along with his inheritance.
Joseph sent every Egyptian out before he wept. Twenty years of silence broke the moment only his brothers were left to hear it.
At the border of Egypt, Abram locked Sarai inside a chest and concealed it among his baggage. The customs officials found it and opened it anyway.
Joseph moved every Egyptian from their city to spare his brothers a taunt. When your whole country has been relocated, no one can call the newcomers foreigners.
Genesis says Joseph's brothers did not recognize him in Egypt. The Aramaic tradition says Joseph spent years posting scribes at every gate to find them.
Famine sent Abraham into Egypt first, and generations later Joseph reached the same land through a pit, prison, and the dreams of a foreign king.
Moses told a generation they had lacked nothing for forty years. Jeremiah watched the children of a later generation hold out empty hands and beg.
Saul kept troubling Israel after death, through a famine that exposed an old royal debt and a curse David spoke by mistake.
The richest woman in besieged Jerusalem sends her servant for bread until nothing is left, then eats a fig skin from the gutter and dies in her gold.
Eikhah Rabbah follows Jerusalem's wealthy through the siege from golden baskets lowered over walls to the shame of being called impure in the nations.
Eikhah Rabbah faces the siege famine through children who remembered abundance, a stream that ran dry, and women who gave away their last loaf to a mourner.
Rome sealed Jerusalem until a starving mother ate the child she once weighed against silver, while the sword took Israel's greatest sages.
After seven years of famine, Joel told Israel to plant the last grain. The seed came from ant hills, and the covenant held.
Mastema sent ravens to strip the fields bare when Terah was born. The famine that named him shaped the world his son Abraham would one day defy.
