340 myths · Page 4 of 12
They struck him on the shoulder all the way back to the city. He had already named their crime once. He did not name it again.
Standing before Egypt's Viceroy, Judah invoked the law of companions taken together. Joseph answered that only the one who stole should remain.
The viceroy would not give Benjamin back. Judah's mouth was empty. He reached for a stone that weighed four hundred shekels.
Egypt had sold him its silver, its cattle, and its fields. Then Joseph emptied its towns and moved the whole population, and his brothers never learned why.
Jacob held both boys against him and waited for the spirit that had never once failed him. Nothing came. Joseph took his sons out of the room.
Joseph's last prophecy named the oppression ahead and the deliverance after it. His only condition was that his brothers carry his bones when they left Egypt.
They would not believe he was dying. Naphtali told them Levi rode the sun, and a ship with no sailors ran onto a rock.
Reuben told Jacob he had liver pain. The real sickness was guilt over Bilhah and Joseph. What followed was seven years of grueling, silent penance.
Jacob saw a vision of Joseph numbered among celestial beings, before Egypt, before the pit. He understood at once this greatness would cost Israel everything.
Balak wanted a plan against Israel. Reuel named four generations of rescue. The king still asked for a curse, so Reuel left the room.
Moses had come to Midian as a fugitive. Jethro took him in, Zipporah married him, his sons were born there. He would not throw a stone into that well.
A Polish scholar compared his battle to Jacob's night fight with the angel. His enemy was not Esau but men who wanted to destroy the tradition from within.
Joseph told Pharaoh the famine would last seven years, but Jacob's arrival canceled it after two. Rabbi Levi Yitzchak explains what Joseph knew when he spoke.
Twelve wet-haired sons waited for a date. Jacob opened his mouth, and the Presence took the year away before a number could land.
The Egyptian governor made small talk with the youngest brother. How many sons do you have? Ten. And what are they called?
Psalm 106 holds a petition small enough to miss: remember me, O Lord. Midrash Tehillim gives God one answer. Your words are living with me, my child.
Reuben planned to rescue Joseph from the pit. He left before the caravan arrived and came back to find the boy gone.
A man in the Shechem field sent Joseph toward Dothan. Joseph was seventeen. Thirteen years later Pharaoh put a ring on that same hand.
Simeon and Levi avenged Dinah at Shechem. Jacob cursed their anger at his deathbed, forty years after the swords were put away.
Slaves cried from the brickfields of Egypt. A shepherd appeared among the cherubim. The last fire filled a house so thick the priests could not stand.
Two officers of Pharaoh woke up frightened. Joseph looked at their faces and asked why they seemed worse this morning than on all the mornings before.
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.
When Joseph's brothers returned with Benjamin, he prepared a feast with sinew removed from the meat and seated eleven men in exact birth order.
Jacob's body waited at the cave mouth while the brothers argued a deed. Dan's deaf son asked why the grave was still empty.
The Nile had carried his basket for seven days. When God sent blood and frogs, Moses would not raise the rod. Aaron struck the water instead.
Jacob sent Judah ahead to Egypt before the family settled. Not to scout, not to cook. To build a house of Torah study before anyone else arrived.
On his deathbed, the patriarch Simeon gathered his children and named the force that had once brought him to the edge of fratricide: not hatred, but envy.
When Joseph revealed himself to his brothers in Egypt, the rabbis say the matriarchs were watching from above. His rise from the pit had a celestial audience.
Joseph walked the empty field near Shechem calling for his brothers. A stranger pointed him to Dothan. The coat came off that day.
Reuben tied his father's donkey to a mandrake root and walked off. He came back to find the plant torn out of the ground and the donkey dead beside it.
