448 myths · Page 9 of 15
Under his feet was something like a pavement of sapphire, clear as the sky. The men who stood there did not die of it. They sat down and had a meal.
Ezekiel was a priest by a canal in Babylon with no altar to serve. The sky opened over the ditch, and four creatures came out of the fire.
From Mount Nebo, God showed Moses two moments the plain below had witnessed: the cities consumed by fire and the dynasty that would make the same ground holy.
After the golden calf, God said He would send an angel instead of coming Himself. The people heard it, took off their ornaments, and never put them back on.
The Torah calls Hagar a maidservant. The Aramaic tradition calls her Pharaoh's daughter, royalty who traded a palace for Abraham's tent.
Abraham was a hundred years old and the house was full of guests. Sarah looked across the weaning feast at the older boy and stopped smiling.
Two officers of Pharaoh woke up frightened. Joseph looked at their faces and asked why they seemed worse this morning than on all the mornings before.
When Joseph's brothers returned with Benjamin, he prepared a feast with sinew removed from the meat and seated eleven men in exact birth order.
Two hundred thousand Ephraimites left Egypt thirty years early, fought the Philistines, and died. Their bones became Ezekiel's valley.
The angels going up the ladder had been shut out of heaven for 138 years. Jacob slept on rocks and saw Sinai, the Temple, and the fire that took it.
Samuel mourned for Saul until the day Samuel himself died. He had made the king and he watched what the king became. The grief was his own making.
A herald went through the camp calling everyone to gather around Joshua, and not one Israelite came. They hung back, shaking, complaining of headaches.
Three hundred mules carried only the keys to Korah's storerooms. The rabbis trace that fortune to Joseph and ask what it means when the richest man rebels.
Balaam said of himself that he knew the knowledge of the Most High. He could not see the angel in the road, and his donkey could.
Balak paid for a curse. From the mountain Balaam's mouth opened and he saw David, the star from Jacob, and the King Messiah rising at the end of days.
God contracted the daylight to strand Jacob at Mount Moriah. In his sleep the stones quarreled, fused into one, and all of Israel history unrolled before him.
The vine Noah planted after the flood came from the Garden of Eden. What he saw in the wine was a vision of the messianic age he encoded in a drunken act.
If my Torah had been among the ten generations before this, God told Shem, I suppose I would not have drowned the world. Go and ask the nations.
Abraham's cattle went out muzzled so they could not eat another man's grass. Lot's went out bare-mouthed, and the argument split the family in two.
Abraham prayed for a foreign king, and every closed womb in that palace opened. Sarah was still barren, and the angels took it up with God.
Elisha was plowing behind oxen when Elijah threw a cloak over his shoulders and said nothing. He performed sixteen miracles, twice Elijah's eight.
The Angel of Death met Elijah at the edge of heaven and refused to move. He had jurisdiction over every human being alive, and he said so.
Pharaoh told Egypt he was a god who felt no human needs. Every morning he went down to the Nile alone to keep it up. One morning Moses was standing there.
On the Mount of Olives, Naphtali watched his brothers race to seize the sun and moon. His two visions mapped the whole future of Israel and its exile.
Reuben lost it. Simeon and Levi burned through it. When the blessing reached Judah it arrived at a man already broken open by what he had done.
Each empire climbed the ladder and descended. The fourth climbed so high Jacob could no longer see the top and terror seized him until God spoke.
Pharaoh's daughter had a Hebrew infant who would not nurse and a line of Egyptian women who had all failed. A girl was watching from a distance.
Solomon had peace, the Temple, and the name Jedidiah. Isaiah saw what the messianic age required. Neither man fully grasped what he held.
The stone Jacob used as a pillow at Bethel was the stone from which God had spread all creation outward. Jacob's dream showed him what would be built there.
An old man hung merchants' scales in front of the throne, put every noble in Egypt in one pan and a baby goat in the other, and the goat went down.
