496 myths · Page 17 of 17
David wanted a blade from heaven. The lamp smoked. Letters held still while his pulse ran ahead of them, and the street outside stayed armed.
The oxen stumbled and the chest leaped off the wagon. Uzzah put out his hand to save it, and he fell dead before the harps could stop.
An Arabian king trusted a portrait and physiognomists. Moses said every ugly trait they read was his by nature, then showed what will had rewritten.
At Gerar the king told Abraham to settle anywhere he liked. Abraham heard the mockery in the offer and did not stay. At night his own body taught him Torah.
Sinai becomes a wine house of love. Israel stands between the yetzer hara, the evil inclination, and Torah while heaven argues life against death.
He invited the man because the hem was clean. After the meal he asked for Bible, Mishnah, lore. The guest had none of it, and still would not take the insult.
The boy would not step past the gate. Robbers waited in the hills, pirates on the water. His father sealed an amulet in a stick and pressed it into his palm.
At Sinai the camp demanded to hear and see the King, not a messenger. God said yes. The voice then drove them the full length of their camp.
Ahab ruled two hundred and fifty-two kingdoms and denied God on his own gates, yet clutched the Torah. His son Joram kept only the ruin.
The formless One came as a warrior at the Sea and turned four faces at the mountain, and each Israelite heard one Word bent to his own strength.
His brothers got vineyards and grain while he got mountains and a raw shore. So Zebulun went up and told God he had been shortchanged.
The merchants laughed at a scholar with no crate. After customs took every bale, they found him teaching Torah in the synagogue and asked him to plead.
At the final reckoning the nations crowd in for Torah's wages, kick apart the one booth God grants them, and the whole account falls to a single line.
In the sealed dark of the womb God keeps the child from spilling, but an adulterer tells Him to step aside and the Shekhinah, the Divine Presence, draws back.
God sent Gabriel, then Michael, then the sword-bearing Samael to take Moses, but none could touch the man worth six hundred thousand.
She danced before the Throne on the sixth day and was betrothed to the soul of Moses. Centuries later she stood in sackcloth while men picked at her.
