120 myths · Page 3 of 4
On the day Ephron became chief of Heth, Abraham sealed the Cave of Machpelah with silver, after a covenant that Israel would not seize Jebus by force.
Isaac walked into his mother's tent and found the lamp dead. The cloud at the flap was gone. The dough sat like any other dough.
The boy was named before he existed. Ishmael mocked the cut done on an infant. On Moriah, Isaac at thirty-seven laid his own life down.
Promised all of Canaan, Abraham still stood in Hebron as a stranger and paid for Sarah's tomb, then refused to bless Isaac lest jealousy crack the house.
Gerar's king had taken Sarah, and every womb in his house shut. Abraham asked God to let them multiply instead. Abimelech's barren wife bore a child.
Famine drove them to Egypt. At the river Abraham saw Sarah's face like the sun, locked her in a chest, and bargained tax rates until the lid was forced open.
Sarah was dead. The land had been promised in stars and animal blood. Abraham asked the men of Hebron for a cave, and he would not take it as a gift.
Seven grooms had married Sarah and died before morning. On the eighth night her father sent a maid to look. She found them asleep.
Seven grooms had died in that house on the wedding night. Tobiyyah sat before the food and would not lift a cup until the deed was sealed.
Dying Rebecca demanded burial beside Sarah and peace between Jacob and Esau. She blessed holy seed, then Jacob swore her bones would rest near Sarah's.
A prophet stood in the Temple court wearing a wooden yoke on his neck. Another prophet walked up, tore it off him, and smashed it in front of the crowd.
At ninety-nine Abram feared circumcision would leave him incomplete. God added a letter to his name, then marked him with age so no scoffer could deny Isaac.
Scoffers doubted Isaac was hers, so Sarah nursed the nations' infants. Abimelech watched the dark all night after God warned him over the sister-wife.
Abraham cut the animals himself and beat the birds off the meat until dark. God did not offer to promote him. God offered to make him.
At one hundred Abraham held a son. On Moriah he held a knife. Coming down, he found Sarah dead and paid four hundred shekels for a grave.
Sarah packed bread and water as if the road were ordinary. Out on the open land Isaac's voice broke her, and even the servants wet the ground weeping.
On the road to Moriah Isaac names the missing lamb. Abraham answers with the truth, and Sarah dies before they reach home again.
The students wanted the dead man's full wage counted while he was still warm. Rav Chiya waits. He left the ledger closed.
Tobiyyah reaches Ecbatana with Raphael hidden beside him. Raguel weeps for joy, then warns that seven grooms died before they could touch Sarah.
Nine hundred thousand came to watch him burn. The fire took the cords and left the man. Later kings tripped on one sentence about a sister.
Leah had four sons and Rachel had none. So Rachel sent her servant Bilhah to Jacob and claimed the two boys Bilhah bore, Dan and Naphtali.
The room smelled of age and oil. Joseph steered his two boys under a dying man's hands, the same hands that once gripped a brother's heel.
Sarah listened at the tent door. Ishmael stood behind her, thirteen and newly circumcised. The angel named a son who was not him.
The nations said the old woman was passing off Hagar's baby as her own. God dried up the milk of every noblewoman who had said it.
Behind the tent flap Sarah laughed at a promised child, then denied it. The visitor answered with four words that still hold the air.
Only Sarah's age is counted year by year at death. Each of the hundred twenty-seven was full, even the barren decades the stars had written empty.
A dream told the king of Gerar he was already a dead man. He had never touched the woman. What he argued for first was the kingdom that had no part in it.
When God renamed Sarai, the tiny letter yod flew to the throne and complained until it was set first in Yehoshua, the name of Moses' heir.
Abraham came down from Moriah with the knife still heavy in his hand, and found Sarah already fallen, her years counted only from the son she had finally held.
No calf bawled in the courtyard, no ewe answered from the pen. The household whispered, some blaming her womb, some blaming Abraham's seed.
