113 myths · Page 2 of 4
Enoch vanished without a grave. Moses left no known tomb. Elijah rose in fire. Jewish sources say some lives end not in death but in translation.
Chronicles of Jerahmeel says the righteous dead emerge from their graves each Shabbat eve to eat, drink, and praise God, then return before nightfall.
He had crossed seven rivers to reach the most notorious woman alive, and it was something she said that finally broke him open.
The officers offered Eleazar a way out. Bring your own food, they said, and only pretend to eat what the king requires. He was ninety, and he said no.
At death an angel names each limb and mourns the acts it performed. Then a farmer, a goldsmith, and a Torah scholar face what they actually own.
A man gathering firewood in the forest was dead. He burned in Gehinnom (afterlife of judgment) because of a shared sin, and only his son's voice in the.
Nobody has ever woken in the morning and found his soul missing, or found his neighbor's soul in his hands. That deposit has never once been mixed up.
Doeg uses his tongue to destroy a city of priests, but David, trained as a shepherd, guards Torah and refuses to act in anger.
Eliezer's prayer is answered before it leaves his heart, the road folds under the camels, and Isaac stands in a field at evening to pray the first mincha.
Three sounds cross the world from end to end though human ears cannot hold them. The loudest is the sound of a soul leaving the body.
Before Abraham smashed his father's idols, his soul had already pleaded with God to stay in heaven. Every human soul forgets the argument it lost.
Angels stood by the bed before the man knew he was dying. His soul came loose at the feet, and his sight got sharper as it rose.
A man who spent his life hunting true justice finds a cottage where every flame is a soul, and his own has burned almost to the wick.
On Moriah the ministering angels broke into weeping above the bound boy, and their tears dropped into Isaac's eyes and stayed there for life.
A blind man and a lame man strip the kings figs, then each blames the other. The soul tries the same defense and learns it grew up at court.
An angel carries each unborn soul through heaven by day, then lets it go down into labor, into affliction, into the long accounting.
Two scribes write every name over a place in fire and in the garden before the soul is judged, and the verdict only decides which room you keep.
Each night the soul slips out to wander the earth and returns like a rehearsal, until the morning it rises clothed in its shroud in the Land.
The worlds would have kept expanding forever. God said dai, enough, and the sages heard that word sitting inside the name Shaddai.
Under quaking mountains Ben Sira feels too small for God's eye, then burns like an oven for wisdom and offers her free to the thirsty.
Rav Chiya teaches that a body still walking is short of its final payment, while Philo says the wicked are dead before burial and the good do not truly die.
A dead soul faces Adam at Machpelah, the flaming sword at Eden, and the climb toward Arabot where the righteous become angels.
An angel walks a new soul past fire-lions and scourges in Gehinnom (afterlife of judgment), naming the damned as once-living people who ignored Torah.
A dying man feels the body's endless taking against the soul's will to give, while husks amplify desire until the sculptor cuts the excess away.
A vast soul is told to diminish like the moon before it can wear a body. Closed inside cloudy flesh, it climbs back by deeds alone.
Light steps down into coarse vessels and puts on dark garments so lowly things can be borne. The Soul seeks knowledge strong enough to hold the descent.
A pure soul refuses a coarse body until clothed in likeness. Inside flesh it meets the evil urge and learns that mitzvot, the commandments, are weapons.
In the dark of the womb the spirit punches openings for eyes, ears, nose, and mouth. Later light leaks through those doors, and a face maps radiance.
The light would not sit in the new vessels. It withdrew and sent down a thin vapor instead, hevla degarmei, the breath of the bones.
Friday dusk thickens and a second soul settles without adding bones. Above, Zeir Anpin matures as Shabbat light completes what weekdays could not hold.
