186 myths · Page 5 of 7
The rabbis taught that Saul's soul was marked for kingship before the flood. What Noah preserved through faithfulness, Saul squandered in a single act of mercy.
Saul spared Agag and lost the throne. Solomon multiplied wives and gold for forty years and kept it. The rabbis traced the difference to a single word.
David lay sick for thirteen years after the census plague, then rose when prayer restored the strength his body had lost.
A headless demon named Envy wanted Solomon's head. Soon Asmodeus wore the king's face, while Solomon begged to be recognized.
Solomon flew on a carpet 60 miles wide and praised his own power. The wind dropped 40,000 men until the king learned one word again.
Elijah held back rain until Ahab repented, but God answered with a dry patch of creation that had waited since the first mist.
Elisha's most gifted disciple inscribed the Divine Name on golden calves and made them utter the words of Sinai. Nothing after that could be undone.
Isaiah expected the sick king to come to him. Hezekiah expected the prophet to come to the palace. Neither moved, and God had to force the standoff to end.
He had his two young sons on his shoulders, walking to the house of study. Riding over his head, they were already debating which idol his bald head resembled.
King Amon hunted down every Torah scroll in Judah and burned them. One scroll survived in the Temple wall. His son Josiah wept when he read it.
Josiah's inspectors toured every home in Judah and found no idols. The people had sawed each idol in half and mounted one half on each side of the front door.
The Torah of Moses had been lost in the Temple so long no one searched for it. When it turned up in the walls, the king who heard it wept.
Jezebel did not merely tempt Ahab. She instructed him. A king who takes lessons in idolatry from his wife becomes a nation's teacher in ruin.
The Torah gave kings three specific prohibitions. Solomon knew all three and violated all three. His reasoning was brilliant. His reasoning was wrong.
Solomon captured Asmodeus to build the Temple, then kept him out of curiosity. Three years later he was wandering as a beggar, and no one believed his name.
At birth a prophet gave Solomon the name Jedidiah, Beloved of God. The rabbis believed the messianic hope lived in that name. Then Solomon lost it.
The rabbis could not place Solomon in paradise or Gehinnom. They placed him at the gate between them, which is where he had always lived.
When the rabbis of Vayikra Rabbah studied what finally destroyed the kingdoms of Israel, they kept arriving at one answer that surprised even them.
Manasseh had spent a lifetime closing every door back to God. Sealed inside a heated brass bull by his captors, he found the one door still open.
A proud king tears the verse that names his fall from the holy book, and a demon in deerskin rides home to sit on his abandoned throne.
Manasseh burns inside a bronze bull while angels seal heaven shut, so God bores a tunnel under His own throne to let one prayer slip through.
For three and a half years the divine presence stood east of Jerusalem calling the city back, and the city treated the call like weather.
Isaiah said Jerusalem would survive Sennacherib. Jehoshaphat died in peace. Menasseh returned from chains. Each proved a different face of the divine promise.
Moses passed four crushing sentences over Israel. Centuries later four prophets took his words apart one by one and softened every decree.
The Song of Moses describes a vine whose fruit is poison and whose clusters are bitter. Then Rabbi Yehudah interrupts to ask the reader a personal question.
Israel wanted to repent but could not lift its eyes. The mountains where they had burned offerings to idols still stood on the horizon every morning.
Reuben climbed back to the pit in sackcloth, found it empty, and named the seven spirits that hunt a man before his line reached Hosea.
The Book of Tobit opens with Israelites in exile celebrating while the Temple lies in ruins. One man refuses to join them. That refusal is the story.
Jonah did not flee from fear. He fled because he knew God would forgive Nineveh. He refused to save the empire destroying Israel.
Nebuchadnezzar's butcher storms the ruined Temple, finds a murdered prophet's blood still boiling, and the cruelest killer of the exile breaks and converts.
