120 myths · Page 2 of 4
Hagar had watched Pharaoh's plague and the furnace miracle before she ever conceived. Her contempt came from drawing the wrong lesson from what she knew.
Lot survived Sodom not only because of Abraham's prayer. The tradition traces his rescue to a moment in Egypt when he stayed silent and heaven noticed.
Abimelech took Sarah the same way Pharaoh had, but the story ended differently. The difference was a raised sword in a dream and the fear of God.
Three men appeared at Abraham's tent. The Aramaic tradition says each was an angel sent for one task, because no divine messenger can carry two missions.
Abraham was a hundred, and the weaning tables were full. Sarah looked past the guests at the older boy and the small figure at his feet.
Abraham prayed, and a foreign king's house filled with infants. Sarah walked home with silver and empty arms until the angels refused to keep quiet.
Abraham was ninety-nine and already had a son he loved. He asked God to let that boy carry the promise. The answer to him began with the word yes.
Sarah's barrenness was not a pause before the covenant. In Philo's reading and Bereshit Rabbah, the closed womb made Isaac impossible to explain without God.
A hundred and twenty-seven years of marriage to account for, and the words he found were an old poem about a capable wife. Every line pointed at him.
Eli watched Hannah's lips move at Shiloh without a sound and decided she was drunk. She told him she was a woman of sorrowful spirit.
Sarah died at Hebron and Abraham owned no ground to bury her in. Ephron called the field a gift, then named a price: four hundred shekels of silver.
Abram knew how to read a horoscope, and his own said he would never father a son. God agreed with the reading, then took him up above the sky.
Twenty years after the theft, Jacob sent word ahead to Esau. The message listed his cattle, his servants, his donkeys. It never mentioned the blessing.
The ram was still burning when he started counting daughters for Isaac. He came home to a quiet tent, and Death was still standing there.
Isaac's bed frame jumped under him. The son at the foot of it still held a bowl of meat. The blessing had already left the room.
The count of Jacob's family going to Egypt comes up wrong. The rabbis sit with the broken sum until it opens a secret about how God keeps promises.
Nimrod piled the wood high enough to flatten a city. The logs put out fruit. His princes fell on their faces and named Abraham's God.
He said the boy was going to study with Shem. She packed bread and water and told him not to walk in the sun. The knife was already in the pack.
God asked for a man with no stain on him. Abraham hit the dust twice in one afternoon, and the second time a laugh came out of the dirt.
Avimelech woke wet and could not make his hand reach Sarah. Rebecca later sent Jacob for two kids, and the blessing came in on goatskin.
Abraham told her the hour for modesty was over. She uncovered, and the noblewomen said out loud that they were not worthy to let their children drink.
Sodom burned people for putting bread into a beggar's hand. Lot fed two strangers anyway, after dark, and then his wife refused them salt.
Abraham paid for a grave and signed a secret deed. His descendants could not take Jerusalem for a thousand years because of what he promised that day.
Sarah was ninety when a visitor promised her a son. She was not only old. She had been born with no chamber inside her for a child to lie in.
Robbed of Isaac when the knife was stayed on Moriah, the accuser Samael raced to Sarah and killed her with the truth of how close the blade had come.
A drawn sword moves unseen through Gerar, men fall in the dark, and a wailing rises that no Philistine can fight or explain.
Before Abraham, no man's hair ever turned white and no elder was honored for his years, so he prayed to be marked by age, and heaven answered.
Sarah was still inside the tent when the promise landed. The cry from the plain came second. Abraham spent that hour on other people's houses.
He paid for barley, then wheat, then gold. They forced the lid anyway. An angel waited in Pharaoh's room with a stick.
Ephron offered Sarah's burial field as a gift, then named four hundred shekels between friends. Abraham weighed full coin for the first lasting foothold.
