178 myths · Page 3 of 6
Abraham was ninety-nine and already had a son he loved. He asked God to let that boy carry the promise. The answer to him began with the word yes.
Death knelt at Abraham's tent smelling of paradise. Abraham asked to see the other face. The servants around him fell before he did.
Abraham was seventy-five when he walked away from his father's house toward a land he had not seen. Isaac sowed in a famine year and reaped a hundredfold.
Sarah died at Hebron and Abraham owned no ground to bury her in. Ephron called the field a gift, then named a price: four hundred shekels of silver.
Eliezer's prayer is answered before it leaves his heart, the road folds under the camels, and Isaac stands in a field at evening to pray the first mincha.
The Philistines filled Abraham's wells with dirt after he died. Isaac dug them open and spoke his father's names over the water again.
Nimrod piled the wood high enough to flatten a city. The logs put out fruit. His princes fell on their faces and named Abraham's God.
Joseph told the dream at the table. Jacob scolded him while the brothers watched. Then he wrote down the hour and the place.
Sodom burned people for putting bread into a beggar's hand. Lot fed two strangers anyway, after dark, and then his wife refused them salt.
Ishmael had been telling his brother for years that he was the braver son. Isaac was thirty-seven when he finally answered him out loud.
One sentence gave him away. Isaac reached out to check by touch, and the young man in the goatskins felt his own heart turn to wax.
Sarah was ninety when a visitor promised her a son. She was not only old. She had been born with no chamber inside her for a child to lie in.
At Isaac's weaning feast the giant Og sneers he could crush the laughing heir with one finger, and Heaven dooms him to fall by that child's seed.
On Moriah the ministering angels broke into weeping above the bound boy, and their tears dropped into Isaac's eyes and stayed there for life.
No messenger told Rebecca. Her prophecy cut a furrow inside a furrow and read the murder Esau had sworn only in his own silent heart.
Before Abraham, no man's hair ever turned white and no elder was honored for his years, so he prayed to be marked by age, and heaven answered.
Jacob came in goat skins. Isaac's eyes were dim. The smell that rose off the clothes was not goat. It was a garden he had never walked.
Take your son, your only son. Abraham answered with two names until Heaven spoke Isaac, then walked three days past a river Satan raised.
Isaac set the basin down. Abraham looked into the water and said he would never wash a guest's feet again. Michael's tears hit it.
Joseph walked as viceroy and son toward Machpelah. At the cave mouth a twin still wanted a plot. A head came to rest on a blind father's knees.
The boy was named before he existed. Ishmael mocked the cut done on an infant. On Moriah, Isaac at thirty-seven laid his own life down.
Isaac was born, and the Philistine king rode to Hebron with twenty advisors. He asked for three generations of peace, no more.
Promised all of Canaan, Abraham still stood in Hebron as a stranger and paid for Sarah's tomb, then refused to bless Isaac lest jealousy crack the house.
The servant ran the whole household and had a daughter of marrying age. He asked once. Then he swore an oath to go and find someone else.
Isaac asked where the lamb was. Abraham did not look at the knife. A ram was already caught in a thicket on Moriah.
At the well Eliezer set a risky sign of water and camels. Before the prayer closed, Rebecca ran with her jug, and heaven corrected a dangerous vow.
Jacob feared a father's curse more than a brother's rage. Rebecca claimed the curse for herself, dressed her smooth son, and sent him in for the blessing.
Isaac could not stand the women his son had married out of Canaan. So Esau rode down to Ishmael's camp and came back with a third one.
Isaac thrived among Philistines until their cruelty over wells. He cursed Caphtor's seed past sword, nations, and even Sheol (the underworld).
Abraham wondered where to cut the covenant. He fell on his face, a scorpion bit the place, and he rose already marked as God's partner.
