19 myths
Myths, legends, and mystical writings about Temptation from across Jewish tradition.
19 myths on JewishMythology.com retell how Jewish tradition imagines temptation, drawn from the Hebrew Bible, Midrash, Talmud, Kabbalah, and later Jewish literature. Each story below synthesizes primary sources into a single narrative; follow any myth to read it, and from there into the source passages behind it.
The plain Lot chose looked exactly like the garden of God. The rabbis asked why the most beautiful valley sat next to the worst city.
Cast out for refusing to bow before Adam, the accuser could not enter Eden, so he poured himself into the serpent and used its mouth as his lyre.
The Red Sea did not split because Moses raised his staff. One rabbi traced it to a single act of moral courage Joseph made in a private room centuries before.
She had spotted Joseph before he arrived in Egypt and arranged his purchase. Then she spent a full year trying everything. The Torah gives it two verses.
God said do not eat. Eve told the serpent do not touch. The rabbis traced Eden's fall to that single addition and were not unsympathetic about it.
Zuleika tried to possess Joseph by force. Asenath fasted, cast off her idols, and waited until heaven remade her soul for covenant.
Joseph thanked God for a soft life in Egypt, but Jacob still sat in ashes. Heaven answered comfort with Zuleika's locked room and royal eyes.
Zuleika covered her idol before approaching Joseph. He answered with five refusals, each one built for a room where power had closed the door.
Egyptian noblewomen mocked Potiphar's wife for obsessing over a slave. She gave each guest a knife and an apple. Then Joseph walked in.
Zuleika emptied the house for the festival and dressed for Joseph alone. He was on the edge of yielding when the image appeared in the room.
Day after day Zuleika praised Joseph's face, his hands, his bearing. He answered every compliment with the same lesson, and she could not hear it.
He paid four hundred coins and crossed the sea for one forbidden night, then his own fringes rose up and slapped him off the bed.
Satan built a face no man could resist and set it in the rabbi's doorway, so Matya took white-hot nails and burned out his own eyes.
God comes to the greedy prophet by night and hides the cliff behind an open door, while Ha-Satan dances ahead on the road until the soul is lost.
In the wilderness, God demands the heart before the eyes, and the bitter water ritual forces desire and secrecy to answer in public.
Elijah teaches a Roman governor to bury his fortune, and a pious washerwoman is sealed in David's tomb among riches no living hand may take.
A poor sage hawking baskets is cornered into sin by a noblewoman, so he hurls himself off her roof, and Elijah races to catch him before the ground does.
A demon in his shade tree offers a pious man daily coins to spare its home, but he swings the axe and unearths a hoard that owes him nothing.
When Potiphar's wife grabbed Joseph's garment, the Zohar says he was not just fleeing temptation -- he was protecting a covenant older than any law.
