215 myths · Page 3 of 8
Joseph wore a coat light enough to hide in one hand, and the brothers answered with a pit, a sale, and goat blood that broke Jacob's house.
Joseph fled Zuleika's grasp and left his cloak behind. Her lie sent him to prison, but his flight later opened the sea for Israel.
Joseph has the power to keep Benjamin forever. He wants to know what his brothers will do when given the chance to abandon the youngest.
Jacob gathers his sons to reveal the End of Days. The moment he opens his mouth, the holy spirit lifts and the words freeze.
Moses tipped the holy oil over Aaron's head and felt it slide onto his own beard. One wet drop nearly broke him with fear.
Nebuchadnezzar wanted music for his banquet, so he sent for the Temple singers. They looked down at their own hands and made a decision.
King David survived lions, bears, and Goliath, but under his own blankets the old king could not get warm, and his inner fire was leaving.
God can speak from anywhere. The rabbis believed he would end the story in one place only, and pinned the final act to a specific mountain.
The brothers cut a young goat's throat and dipped the coat in its blood. Their father believed it for more than twenty years.
A tenth-century midrash read a parable in Ecclesiastes as an allegory for Eden. The great king outside the walls is the serpent. The poor wise man is Adam.
The rabbis of Esther Rabbah noticed Haman and three biblical villains all opened with the same Hebrew word. That word also means anger.
Two bowls were set before the three-year-old: gold and jewels in one, burning coals in the other. He put a coal to his lips and burned his tongue.
When Jacob arrived in Haran empty-handed, Laban's welcome embrace was not affection. The midrash says he was frisking his nephew for a hidden fortune.
For thirty-six nights Moses rose at midnight, slipped into Joshua's room, and cleaned the shoes of the man who would replace him.
Korah did not start his rebellion with a speech. He started it with a story about a poor widow that made every listener hate Moses on the spot.
Adam saw David would live only three hours. He signed away seventy years of his own life so the greatest king of Israel could exist at all.
Aaron covered the Ark with his own hands before every march. Then Israel stopped the registration to ask, out loud, who his son had married.
Mordechai told Esther her fast fell on Passover. She told him to fast anyway. If Israel was destroyed, what use was the festival?
Eve stands outside the gate of paradise begging heaven for relief while Adam lies dying inside and two angels keep watch at the door.
Trapped between Pharaoh's chariots and the sea, Israel faced a second hunter in heaven: Samael the accuser, whom God quieted by throwing him Job.
The High Priest drew lots over two identical goats. One went to God and one went to Azazel. The second goat went to the edge of the world and was destroyed.
Rabbi Tarfon groaned when Elazar Hamodai claimed the manna stood sixty cubits high. Then the old sage began counting the windows of heaven.
Seven sheep were laid against David each day for warmth, and none of it reached him. He had counted Israel, and seventy thousand men died in the plague.
All the rivers run to the sea, Ecclesiastes says. The rabbis read that as Rome, and said the scholars would get the money in the end.
Abraham accused God of slipping out of His own oath. God answered by offering to march every generation He had ever destroyed past him, one at a time.
Abraham entered Canaan, saw its figs and olives and mountain water, built altars on ground that was not yet his, then asked God how the promise could survive.
At Sinai, not one Israelite carried a wound or a blemish. For forty days it held. Then the golden calf broke the spell, and every illness returned at once.
After Abel's blood soaked the ground, Adam fled Eve for 130 years. Female spirits found him there, and grief took on bodies.
Jacob woke on his stone pillow in the dark and said out loud that the place frightened him. Abraham had named Moriah with the knife still in his hand.
When Adam left the Garden, the animals followed him out. What happened next was a quarrel the rabbis preserved for two thousand years.
