215 myths · Page 7 of 8
Esau lunged to bite his brother to death, but Jacob's neck hardened like ivory, and the hunter howled while his own teeth cracked.
Four merits had carried Israel out of Egypt. At Shittim the people took Moabite women, and the midrash says the spring itself ran with Sodom's old poison.
A father may carry a child who has grabbed a stone and will not let go. The rabbis proved it from God carrying a people that had packed an idol.
Abraham came on the tower works by accident, brick dust thick in the air. He shouted, and his words landed like a stone the workers stepped over.
Three grooms die on Hannahs first nights. Poor cousin Joseph feeds Death at his table, lives past the wedding, and keeps the cursed bride.
Nargesanel demands Israel for his fire and is refused. Shabbat stills Gehinnom (afterlife of judgment) each week, and the World to Come locks Accuser and.
A servant picks the lightest penalty for a rotten fish and still pays all three. Pharaoh bargained the same way through every plague in Egypt.
Mountains trembled under Sodom for more than two decades. A girl who hid flour for a starving friend burned. Abraham still drew near to plead.
David went out with his men one more time and his strength gave out in the middle of the fighting. Afterward they made him swear never to come again.
Aaron stopped on the road and greeted men planning sin that night. By morning shame held them, and two enemies kissed, never knowing who had lied for peace.
On the Mount of Olives David climbs barefoot, tears on his face, a psalm in his mouth. Absalom takes the city, and measure for measure walks with the king.
Joshua ordered sun and moon to stand, and the midrash says the righteous rule the lights, holding day open until Israel's battle was done.
Drunk on matching goblets, Ahashverosh wants Vashti shown. Memukhan offers her head on a platter and seals the refusal into irrevocable Persian law.
Jacob slept on bare ground while the guardian princes of the nations plotted above him, and God stepped between them and His favorite.
Some in the camp tested God without saying a word: if He knows what we are thinking, we will serve Him. The answer that walked in was Amalek.
Jacob and Laban stacked rocks until the border could speak for them. No embrace followed, only a promise not to cross for harm while Israel learned to stand.
At the sea an Egyptian rebukes his horse for rushing into the water. The horse answers that it sees the heights of the universe in the deep.
King David cursed his enemies in a psalm and God stopped him cold, naming Saul, until David turned the slip into a song of unwitting fault.
The body lay finished and empty, limbs shaped, face still. God looked at its mouth and heard the slander it would one day spread against a neighbor.
Before heaven and earth, six raw elements lay in the dark, and God built the world alone, refusing every angel who could later claim a share.
At Babel, under Joshua, and at the end with Gog, the world massed to break heaven's cords, and three times the plot recoiled on the plotters.
On the eighth string of a psalm the sages trace where the soul goes, and find the righteous still teaching Torah with murmuring lips inside the grave.
Hyrkanos moved his son off the stony field onto the best soil he owned. Eliezer cut one furrow in it and wept again. He was twenty-eight years old.
At the final reckoning the nations crowd in for Torah's wages, kick apart the one booth God grants them, and the whole account falls to a single line.
Abigail knelt in David's path and named where the dead go. The righteous bound in the bundle of life, the wicked slung out past the sky.
Thirty-one kings marched to drink Israel's waters and drowned at Kishon, while Sisera's mother counted the hours for a son who would never come home.
Before God strikes any nation on earth, His night court throws down that people's guardian-prince in heaven, and the kingdom falls by morning.
In the sealed dark of the womb God keeps the child from spilling, but an adulterer tells Him to step aside and the Shekhinah, the Divine Presence, draws back.
Every one of the thirty-one kings Joshua killed had once reclined at Abraham's weaning feast, their names later written in a column read in one breath
The moon blazed a night too early on the road to Rosh Hashanah, and Rabbi Hiyya filled his hands with grit and threw it at the sky.
