228 myths · Page 5 of 8
The tablets were already in pieces and God had said the reckoning was not closed. Moses went into the finished tent alone and listened.
A man was caught gathering wood on the Sabbath. They held him in custody because Moses, who had received the law at Sinai, did not know the ruling.
Princesses on the rooftops threw bracelets down to make Joseph look up. He kept his eyes on the road. His family later threw their gold into a fire.
Akiva had watched the ship go down. He came to court so the man's widow could remarry, and the man he had seen drown walked in and stood in front of him.
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.
Shamchazai and Azael descended to prove angels could master the earth. One hangs in repentance between the worlds; the other became a name in the desert.
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
Years later Reuben told his sons what he had hidden. He had wanted Joseph dead. A sickness held his liver eleven months, one for each month of the hatred.
Two robbers cry favoritism, a wicked man buys eternity with one hour, and in Ashkelon two funerals carry the wrong men to the wrong graves.
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.
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.
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.
The priests said it was sacrificial blood. Nebuzaradan slaughtered animals on the spot to compare. Theirs lay flat and dead. The other pool kept boiling.
Pappias hears flattery in "like one of Us." Akiva hears a wound. Adam stood between two roads and let immortal water slip through his hand.
A miser dies with an empty ledger. A merchant who fed a blind man is spared. A false-pious woman walks through Gehinnom.
Haman's decree of death hung over the Jews, so Mordecai led twelve thousand priests and a weeping city out into the open, the Torah bared to the sky.
God showed Noah the blueprints himself, and the work took fifty-two years so a doomed generation might still turn while the floating city rose.
For one hundred twenty years Noah warned of water. The crowds mocked and boasted they would roof the earth with iron if fountains burst from below.
Manasseh filled the Temple with a four-faced idol and chased Isaiah into a tree. They sawed the cedar until the blade reached the prophet's mouth.
For fifty-two years the mountains quaked over Sodom as a call to return. When the city refused, the same heaven that sends manna poured fire instead.
Isaac could not stand the women his son had married out of Canaan. So Esau rode down to Ishmael's camp and came back with a third one.
Judah gave Tamar to Er, then Onan. Heaven struck both sons, and later a dream told a broken man his earnest tears had been heard.
Ahab killed Naboth to steal his vineyard. Then he asked King Jehoshaphat to whip him, and he fasted and prayed, and God put off the punishment.
After Nineveh turned, Jonah still burned for his own honor. God grew a plant of two hundred seventy-five leaves, then withered it, and asked who deserves pity.
The flood generation pressed their own children into the rising springs as stoppers. The water came around the children and kept coming.
Pharaoh snuck to the river before dawn to hide a god's body, and Moses met him there while frogs later split even palace stone.
Nebuchadnezzar locked Yehoyakhin away under a decree of childlessness. Prison piety and a queen's hairdresser reopened the line that led to Zerubbabel.
Abraham feared dying into an idol-maker's house. Heaven told him Terah had turned, and a doubled name sealed the old man for both worlds.
The worst king of Judah, bent in iron and drowning in idols, bent the knee of his heart until mercy answered captivity.
Abraham was told to look down. Six heavens opened beneath his feet, and Leviathan's fins held up the middle bar of the earth while he stood on nothing.
