53 myths · Page 1 of 2
Two angels stood over Enoch while he slept and called him by name. They did not come to bury him. By morning the house had no master.
The marble looked like standing water. Akiva told them not to shout. Heaven does not forgive a lie about what sits in front of the eyes.
Hair pushed through the river clay before dawn. The thing opened its eyes, looked at the three men, and had no word in its mouth.
A water carrier lifts one more bucket as the world rests on his bent back. He is one of thirty-six hidden righteous, and he must never find out.
Before sky, sea, or soil, the Torah burned in black fire on white fire as God held the blueprint that would become the world.
Three times the old prophet told him to stay behind. Elisha swore he would not leave, and then fire came down between their feet.
The wings thundered like a flood, then folded. Ezekiel, a priest on a Babylonian canal, was the only living man left in that quiet.
The innermost room was not empty. Two gold children held each other over the Ark, and the men who broke in hauled that closeness into the street.
One Sabbath in the valley of Gennesaret, two men climbed trees after birds. One broke the law and lived. One kept it and died.
Adam stood east of the garden and watched a blade of fire turn without a hand. Two keepers breathed. The path behind them was not sealed.
He slept with stones under his head. Above him the same face was already carved into the Throne. The angels came down to look, then to strike.
Elisha ben Abuya entered heaven and saw an angel seated on a throne. In heaven, no one sits. His mind drew one conclusion, and it cost him everything.
The angel who took Abraham's hand introduced himself as the one who had burned down his father's house with his father still inside it.
Abraham could not see. His knees were going. Iaoel held him and said the One coming loved him, and that he would not see God Himself.
Abraham could not see. The angel held him upright. Then a voice from the fire told him to look down through the floors of heaven.
They died house by house from Gevat to Antipatris. When the seven weeks ended, Akiva had seven men left and a country full of graves.
He asked for a face no living body could survive. God gave him a cave, a covering hand, and the air after the Presence had gone.
The rabbis nearly voted to suppress the Book of Ezekiel. One sage locked himself away with 300 jugs of oil and refused to stop until the book was safe.
They soaked wool against his heart so the fire would last. The letters left the burning scroll and went up while Rabbi Ishmael set a harder rule.
Old enemies joined forces when they learned Israel's strength lived in prayer, so Balak searched for a mouth that could curse.
Elisha asked for a double portion of Elijah's spirit. Elijah called it a hard thing. Elisha watched and received it, and the count came out exactly right.
Every Lag ba-Omer, Isaac Luria led students to Shimon bar Yohai's grave to dance. One year an old man in white joined. Only the Ari recognized him.
A spirit tore through Arabia and no army could stop it. Solomon sent a servant with a leather bottle and a ring engraved with the divine name.
Solomon needed a worm that could split rock without a blade. The king of demons kept the secret under a sealed well on a far mountain.
Elijah came back from heaven to explain why women are indispensable to men, and why God refuses to destroy even creatures no one wants.
From a cave in Roman Judea to a fiery rock in medieval Spain, Elijah carried Jewish mysticism across a thousand years.
A kabbalist conjured Elijah and asked how to chain the Prince of Evil. He came within one act of forcing the Messiah's arrival. One mistake ended everything.
A man in Nineveh pulled his house down for one stolen brick. Two others found gold in a trench and spent weeks trying to give it away.
Every Sabbath Vashti stripped Jewish women and forced them to weave. When her own humiliation came, it came on the seventh day.
Rabbi Joseph Karo wrote the Shulchan Aruch by day and received a heavenly visitor by night. One night the maggid explained his wife's past life to him.
