215 myths · Page 5 of 8
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.
The builder's son came to the quarry pale as tallow. His thumb would not close. Solomon closed the boy's fingers around a ring cut with the Name.
A builder on a beam answers how the world was made, and the waters revolt, the trees grow proud, and God tears the deep apart with one finger.
Four delegations stood before Alexander with Israel's own verses in their mouths. A man with no title asked leave to answer them.
A watchman comforts a weeping widow, a corpse vanishes from his gallows, and to save his life she digs up her own husband to hang in its place.
God burned the angels who doubted man, then folded a pure light beneath His Throne for the Messiah and a star to time the end.
Two great lights, one crown. When the moon is shrunk to the lesser lamp she storms the court for justice, and heaven ends up owing her a debt.
Refused at the ark for having no mate, Falsehood weds Wickedness to sneak aboard, and the flood meant to drown deceit carries the pair through.
Og measured the camp of Israel with one eye, tore a mountain loose, and balanced it on his head to bury a whole nation under a single stone.
His own men flung Joab over the enemy wall, his sword snapped against their armor, and the blood of the slain glued the next blade to his hand.
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 sage lodges with a butcher, the new wife schemes in the dark, and Rabbi Meir walks home to demand the lions pass sentence on him
A trapped bird teaches Rabbi Shimon ben Yochai that Heaven speaks every pardon and every snare, and he walks out to purify Tiberias.
At Isaac's weaning feast the giant Og sneers he could crush the laughing heir with one finger, and Heaven dooms him to fall by that child's seed.
A woman brought her dream to one sage and bore a son, then a heretic brought his to another and was read aloud as a confession.
Driven into forbidden seas, two sages prove the ocean drinks its own water, then meet an angel stitching light for a gardener no one noticed.
Beruriah hides her two dead sons through Shabbat, then asks Rabbi Meir whether a deposit must be returned before she opens the door.
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.
Three men stood unburned in the fire, and when the king cried that the fourth looked like a son of God, an angel came down and struck his mouth.
A necromancer squeezes a dead man's voice from his armpits while a starving student's breath of Torah climbs past the sky toward Heaven.
God carried Adam, one day old and still wet from the river of Eden, past every gate to the highest heaven. The first man sang his hymn to the day, not to God.
The cupbearer had just been promised Pharaoh's cup again in three days. So the baker told his own dream, certain three baskets meant three rungs up.
No one crowned him. He took the throne in the first wail and the first grasping fist, and held it thirteen years before a barefoot boy came to the gate.
He could name every herb from cedar to hyssop. Four roads left no mark. He set the tablet down and said he did not know.
Jacob counted it out loud. Joseph gone, Simeon gone, and now Benjamin. His sons waited in the doorway with the grain sacks already roped to the donkeys.
Pharaoh's daughter reaches for the ark in the reeds, her maidens block her in the name of the decree, and Gabriel strikes them down.
She had been told to look at the floor. Between two walls of standing water she pointed at the glory and named God as hers.
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.
A gentile seer who could gaze on the Shekhinah, the Divine Presence, shoves past his servants at dawn to saddle his own donkey, hungry to curse Israel.
Hadrian strides into the Holy of Holies to revile God to His face, and a king dead a thousand years rises from the psalms to answer him.
