236 myths · Page 5 of 8
Joseph praised his brothers with one breath and ranked himself above them with the next. He was seventeen and did not understand what he was doing to himself.
At one hundred and thirty-two, Naphtali told his sons two visions: brothers riding sun and stars, and a ship nearly wrecked by jealousy.
Egyptian noblewomen mocked Potiphar's wife for obsessing over a slave. She gave each guest a knife and an apple. Then Joseph walked in.
In the year Joseph was sold, Jacob was too broken to arrange marriages. His sons had to find their own wives in grief's shadow.
Zuleika emptied the house for the festival and dressed for Joseph alone. He was on the edge of yielding when the image appeared in the room.
Joseph led the whole court of Egypt out to meet his father. Jacob saw the procession and bowed before he knew who stood at its head.
Joseph told his brothers what their bowing sheaves meant: their fruit would rot, his would stand. And through his line the Messiah of Joseph would come.
Joseph lost his way near Shechem searching for his brothers. The man who found him wandering was not a man, and what he said changed everything.
Reuben planned to pull Joseph from the pit in secret and bring him home to Jacob. He came back too late. The rabbis say God rewarded him for it anyway.
The moment the caravan took Joseph, Judah's brothers turned on him. The authority that arranged the sale was the authority they stripped from him.
Judah saved Joseph from murder but sold him into slavery. His years in Adullam, with dead sons and a dead wife, were the price of a half-done rescue.
Day after day Zuleika praised Joseph's face, his hands, his bearing. He answered every compliment with the same lesson, and she could not hear it.
Zuleika spent months preparing the trap. She faked illness, cleared the house, and used the garment Joseph left behind to destroy him before witnesses.
The guards had orders to beat Joseph. A voice none of them expected stopped the room cold. Potiphar's infant son had opened his mouth and begun to speak.
When the silver cup turned up in his sack, his brothers called Benjamin a thief. He answered with a question about the kid of the goats.
His brothers struck him on the shoulder and called him thief. Benjamin had said the one thing that silenced them. He walked quietly and earned the Temple.
Standing before Egypt's Viceroy, Judah invoked the law of companions taken together. Joseph answered that only the one who stole should remain.
When Judah broke into sobs before the Viceroy, the cry traveled four hundred parasangs. Hushim heard it in Canaan and leaped into Egypt in a single bound.
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.
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.
God told the tribes: from Shechem you stole him, to Shechem you return him. The burial matched the theft with a precision that had waited four centuries.
Naphtali called his children to a banquet, then told them he was dying. His two visions of ships and stars foretold a nation falling into ruin.
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.
When Balak called a war council against Israel, one voice said stop. He cited four generations of history and walked out when no one listened.
God commanded war against Midian. Moses did not lead it. His reason was not cowardice. It was a principle of loyalty that military necessity could not override.
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.
While Israel stood ready to flee Egypt, Moses spent three days searching the Nile for a coffin no living person could find.
She appears in Genesis and again in Numbers, four centuries apart, with no explanation. The rabbis gave her one: she never died.
