92 myths · Page 3 of 4
One afternoon in a garden bent every birth after it. God's presence climbed seven heavens away. Six righteous bodies slowly dragged it back down.
Thirty-one kings fight over a strip of land none of them plan to live in, where two debt clocks run at once and one word hides God's grief.
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.
Malkitzedek walked out of Shalem with bread and wine for a man coming off a battlefield, and then he blessed him in the wrong order.
He paid for every item himself. The goat he set down answered for the blood his ancestor Judah once smeared on Joseph's coat.
Bereshit Rabbah finds a human being concealed inside the word for very, and flips Moav's infamous birth into the ancestry of Ruth and David.
Arpachshad built towers a hundred cubits above his gates, and they did not save him. Then Nebuchadnezzar sent envoys west, and the nations laughed at them.
Other petitioners had waited days for an audience. The elders from Jerusalem came in at once, and the king's first question was how to keep his kingdom.
A brick fell off the tower and the whole work line sat down and wept. A man fell the same morning and nobody turned his head.
David cursed a murderer and the curse ran down his bloodline for generations. A king's words do not expire. They wait.
A proud king tears the verse that names his fall from the holy book, and a demon in deerskin rides home to sit on his abandoned throne.
Alexander rode south to plunder Afriki and was sat before a feast he could not eat, then judged by a verdict that exposed his whole empire.
The Queen of Sheba crossed a desert to expose Solomon as a fraud. He sat her on a floor of glass that looked like water, and the testing began.
After the night raid that freed Lot, Abraham sorted spoil for Shem, son of Noah. Angels answered his prayer and named God his shield.
Ahab wanted a vineyard, so he had Naboth killed for a crime he never did. In the court of heaven the dead man stepped up and tipped the scales.
Ahab killed Naboth to steal his vineyard. Then he asked King Jehoshaphat to whip him, and he fasted and prayed, and God put off the punishment.
After Shechem fell, allied kings gathered to wipe out Jacob. Their own counselors recited Abraham's miracles until the armies turned home.
A runner reached the oaks of Mamre with the news that Lot was gone. Abraham armed three hundred and eighteen house servants and went after four kings.
Abraham cut the animals himself and beat the birds off the meat until dark. God did not offer to promote him. God offered to make him.
At Bethel's illicit altar Jeroboam seized toward the man of God, and his arm dried in midair until he begged the same prophet to heal him.
Primordial kings fall and vessels crack before the world is ready. Judgment hardens into limits, garments seize control, and light later sifts toward repair.
The early kings of light broke because their vessels could not hold them. In a ruined field a farmer replants soil that remembers harvest and blight.
The new king ignored the pomp and hunted for judges. Jerusalem's beauty, he knew, was not marble. It was a clean court.
All the kings of the House of David sat before him. The kings of Israel stood behind. The seat under him rose forty parasangs high and burned.
Hezekiah hired tutors for his son. Manasseh filled Jerusalem with idols anyway, and only Assyrian hooks in his flesh made him pray.
While kings of east and west slept until the third hour, David rose at midnight to praise God, then asked his teacher if his judgments were pure.
Alone against nine kings, Abraham works with God until midnight. The night divides, enemies fall, and a later midnight in Egypt is already promised.
Balak fills the City of Streets with markets and crowds to manufacture pity. He feeds Balaam one ox and one sheep after promising mountains of honor.
A starving sage tested the king's ring in boiling water and whispered Nature. When pressed, he named the miller blood that taught him every skill.
Four invading kings dig tar pits as traps in the Vale of Siddim. Sodom sinks into clay until an angel hauls the king up for later judgment.
