283 myths · Page 5 of 10
Three rabbis wept when a fox walked out of the Holy of Holies. Akiva laughed, reading the ruin as proof the prophecy of rebuilding was now guaranteed.
Moses summoned Dathan and Abiram to be heard. Their answer came back: we will not come up. The ground opened and swallowed them and their households.
Three sounds cross the world from end to end though human ears cannot hold them. The loudest is the sound of a soul leaving the body.
The Tree of Life holds twenty-two paths. Without them light cannot act, and without sweetened judgment, Adam cannot face what he has done.
Cedars cracked and the hills ran. Houses filled with light that had no lamp behind it. The nations went looking for Balaam to ask what was coming.
Nebuchadnezzar's advisers warned him not to raise a good puppy from a bad dog. So he took the boy king off the throne and put him in a Babylonian cell.
Adam stood in the river Gihon with the water up to his neck for a hundred and thirty years, waiting to hear whether the court had finished with him.
Akiva had watched the ship go down. He came to court so the man's widow could remarry, and the man he had seen drown walked in and stood in front of him.
Israel tied the lamb in the yard for four days where every Egyptian could see it. Then God came through Egypt that night in person, not by angel.
The Song of the Sea drowns Egypt three different ways. Straw, stone, and lead were not poetry but verdicts, each weight matched to its guilt.
A sleeping Jew watches the dead weighed in heaven, and a giant lifts a grave open so an angry father can name the debt his living son left unpaid.
Seven fiery chambers where lions eat the dead and begin again, traitor-kings warden the nations, and scorpions with countless mouths lash the prostrate.
The dying open their eyes and the Angel of Death fills the world end to end, then waits at the grave for a name the dead cannot remember.
When the serpent ruined Eden, God did not curse it offhand. He convened a court of seventy-one angels to try the creature and pass sentence.
An angel walks a trembling soul down seven descending floors of fire, where the gates lock the feet and each punishment is cut to fit the sin.
Angels stood by the bed before the man knew he was dying. His soul came loose at the feet, and his sight got sharper as it rose.
A rich man warns his wife never to open one door. The hand that pulls her through leads into Gehinnom, the afterlife of judgment, and its burning floors.
The dogs howled when the Angel of Death came through the door, covered in eyes. Then God asked the dead man what Torah he had studied.
Solomon hands a builder a silver goblet that fuses his wife's mouth to her lover's, and a robber on the road exposes a second wife's heart.
For thirty years a basket of warm bread and figs appeared at a widow's door every Friday. She never once caught the hand that left it there.
A blind man and a lame man strip the kings figs, then each blames the other. The soul tries the same defense and learns it grew up at court.
Solomon's golden throne was a machine of restrained beasts, and a herald cried a forbidden law at every step he climbed toward judgment.
Two scribes write every name over a place in fire and in the garden before the soul is judged, and the verdict only decides which room you keep.
A miser dies with an empty ledger. A merchant who fed a blind man is spared. A false-pious woman walks through Gehinnom.
A snake that strangled the man who saved it, a stolen cow, and an egg sued for its unborn chickens all come before the boy king.
The sun and moon went dark for a year as the deep burst, and Noah rode a splinter of cedar across a drowned world toward Lubar.
A herdsman with a broken tongue marched into Israel's golden-calf shrine and named its ruin, while the priest ran to the king to have him silenced.
A dying man summoned before the King runs to his three lifelong friends, but only his good deeds pass the gate and walk in at his side.
Abundance made them cruel. When the deep opened they stuffed infants into the geysers, tried to flip the ark, and met fire from above.
For one hundred twenty years Noah warned of water. The crowds mocked and boasted they would roof the earth with iron if fountains burst from below.
