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 years old and the house was full of guests. Sarah looked across the weaning feast at the older boy and stopped smiling.
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.
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.
Walking down the mountain he was already planning his son's wedding. He got home and the news had beaten him there, and his wife had died of it.
Isaac shook so hard the bed frame moved. He told his son the blessing had already been given away and would stand. Esau begged for a leftover.
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 threw Abraham into a furnace and the logs sprouted fruit trees. Nimrod's own son walked in to stand with Abraham and died in the flowers.
Abraham lied to Sarah about where Isaac was going. Rebekah held a prophecy for decades and acted alone. Two mothers carried what their husbands could not name.
God asked for a man with no stain on him. What hit the ground when Abraham dropped was everything his eyes and mouth had dragged in.
Avimelech woke sweating from a dream and discovered his own desire was on God's leash. Rebecca sent Jacob for two kids and seeded Yom Kippur.
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.
Under the terebinths the visit still looked like a visit. Sarah would have a son, God said first. Only then did He mention the cry from Sodom.
Famine drove Abraham south. Border men prized open a chest of light, Pharaoh took Sarah, and leprosy answered on the fifteenth of Nisan.
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.
