16 myths
Love in Jewish tradition: the love between God and Israel, the Song of Songs, and the commandment to love your neighbor as yourself.
16 myths on JewishMythology.com retell how Jewish tradition imagines love, drawn from the Hebrew Bible, Midrash, Talmud, Kabbalah, and later Jewish literature. Each story below synthesizes primary sources into a single narrative; follow any myth to read it, and from there into the source passages behind it.
A stone that took a dozen shepherds to move. A seventeen-year-old fugitive. A girl leading her flock. Jacob rolled it off by himself.
The nations asked Rabbi Akiva why a beautiful, strong people would die for an invisible Beloved. He answered from a love poem, reading one word as above death.
Ben Sabar earned two hundred more years by helping an orphan marry. A younger sage was taken mid-study, desired above, and mourned for three days.
David looked down the line of kings coming out of him, saw the one who would burn his own children, and stopped calling himself a king.
Rabbi Abahu opened a cellar of seventy casks and found sixty-nine gone to vinegar. That one surviving barrel is the whole reason Israel got its flags.
God's throne stood five hundred years above the seventh heaven. He left it all and asked freed slaves for scraps of wool so He could live among them.
Before Eve, God shaped a first woman from the raw earth while Adam looked on. Repelled by her making, he turned away, and only sleep gave him a second bride.
Love climbed past every title. God named Israel daughter, then sister, then mother, while Israel's heart stayed awake in exile's sleep.
A king first called his girl daughter, then sister, then mother as love grew. Rabbi Elazar mapped that climb onto God and Israel, and earned a kiss.
One friend takes the others death seat as hostage. The condemned man settles his house and races back so his companion will not die for him.
Six years end, freedom stands open, and a man who loves master, wife, and children asks for the awl that pins his ear to the doorpost until Jubilee.
Because I circumcised my son, the first one said. The next was going to the fire for reading Torah aloud. A third had eaten matzah.
Three years after Sarah dies, Rebecca enters the tent and Isaac's mourning finally breaks. Love turns toward the wife while honor still climbs to the parents.
Hananya came home to streets full of new houses. At the well he heard a girl called daughter of Hanina and followed her to a door he did not recognize.
A feverish youth wastes for a woman of his town. The sages refuse every cure that would spend her dignity to buy his recovery.
A childless couple of Sidon comes for a bill of divorce. Rabbi Shimon sends them to feast first, and she chooses the only treasure that matters.
