170 myths · Page 3 of 6
A herald went through the camp calling everyone to gather around Joshua, and not one Israelite came. They hung back, shaking, complaining of headaches.
Solomon used a ring inscribed with God's name to call every beast, bird, and demon to his table. Every creature came dancing. Then one did not appear.
The drawing kept collapsing. Nothing held until God made repentance and set it down beside the Throne, before there was any light to see it by.
Solomon had peace, the Temple, and the name Jedidiah. Isaiah saw what the messianic age required. Neither man fully grasped what he held.
Every day ten oxen, a hundred sheep, and a bird from Barbary carrying itself to the kitchen. The world came to Solomon unbidden. Then it stopped coming.
Korah looked into the future and saw Samuel and twenty-four Temple singers coming out of his own line. He decided God would never let their father die.
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.
The stone Jacob used as a pillow at Bethel was the stone from which God had spread all creation outward. Jacob's dream showed him what would be built there.
Rabbi Joshua ben Levi descended through all seven chambers of Gehinnom (afterlife of judgment) and returned. Solomon never went himself, but he sent his.
No king who came after Solomon could replicate his throne. The problem was not the gold or the ivory. The throne was built to humble whoever sat on it.
Jacob wrestled an angel until dawn and demanded a blessing. Job accused heaven of injustice and God called him correct. Solomon built a throne to mirror it.
A golden lion put out its paw with a law cut into it, and Solomon could not reach the second step until he read it. In Babylon the lions were alive.
Jacob had not received prophecy in twenty-two years. When the wagons arrived from Egypt carrying proof that Joseph was alive, the spirit returned in an instant.
The Torah never asked for trees inside the Temple. Solomon planted them in gold anyway, and they bore fruit until Babylon burned the Temple down.
Rabbinic legend describes a city outside the Angel of Death's jurisdiction, built where Jacob slept, guarded by a bone that cannot be destroyed.
A demon stood bound in front of the king of Israel and told him to go wash his hands before he questioned her. Solomon got up and washed his hands.
Hiram of Tyre supplied the cedar for Solomon's Temple, then spent centuries building seven false heavens to claim the throne that was not his.
The king who speaks every language hears an ant warn her colony before his army crushes them and learns his glory looks like danger from the ground.
Solomon sees the Angel of Death eyeing his two scribes and sends them to Luz, where death cannot enter. But death is already waiting there.
Solomon finds a silver plate deep in a statue that speaks of Shadad ben Ad, who ruled a thousand thousand kingdoms and vanished at a touch.
All Egypt was out at the festival. Joseph stayed in an empty house doing his master's accounts, and the road to Pharaoh's court started there.
No iron could touch the Temple stones, so Solomon needed the Shamir worm. Benaiah drained the well where Ashmedai the demon drank and poured in wine.
Solomon binds Ashmedai with the Ineffable Name to get the shamir. After the Temple is built, Ashmedai borrows the royal ring and throws Solomon into exile.
The Temple burned and one wall stayed up. Rabbi Yosei said God swore never to let that wall fall, and that God still stands behind the stones.
Solomon warned that a bird of heaven carries the voice. The midrash says that bird is an angel, and Saul's curse reached heaven as soon as he said it.
Saul's men watched the house all night and waited for morning. By then David was over the sill and gone, and there was goat's hair on the pillow.
Two Hebrews watched Moses kill the Egyptian, and one of them said so out loud in the street. By morning the executioner had him.
The Levites stand on their platform as the Temple burns, their verse breaks off in their mouths, and praise survives the fire by surviving inside it.
Doeg uses his tongue to destroy a city of priests, but David, trained as a shepherd, guards Torah and refuses to act in anger.
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.
