496 myths · Page 7 of 17
Jewish law says a hanged body must come down before dark. Haman and his ten sons stayed up there, and the scholars lost the argument.
After Purim, Esther asked the sages to inscribe her story in the Hebrew Bible. They refused twice. Then she quoted Moses to them.
The first commandment killed them. Angels revived the camp and the second killed them again. Only then did they ask Moses to stand in between.
Two identical goats stood before the High Priest. A lot decided which burned on the altar and which walked alive into the wilderness carrying Israel's sins.
The Torah of Moses had been lost in the Temple so long no one searched for it. When it turned up in the walls, the king who heard it wept.
Rabbi Loew built a clay guardian to defend Prague's Jews from blood libel violence. When the emperor promised protection, the Golem's work was done.
On Simhat Torah 1609 in Safed, a mystic dreamed that Moses was laid on the reading table and unrolled from Genesis to Deuteronomy like a scroll.
Rabbi Joseph Karo wrote the Shulchan Aruch by day and received a heavenly visitor by night. One night the maggid explained his wife's past life to him.
A Polish scholar compared his battle to Jacob's night fight with the angel. His enemy was not Esau but men who wanted to destroy the tradition from within.
God told him to make the lampstand and Moses could not do it. God built a model out of four fires. Moses looked at it and still could not do it.
Moses spent forty days on Sinai. The Torah he wrote was only part of what he received. The rest was a light that cannot be carried in letters.
Jonah's ship was the human body. The sailors were the limbs. The captain was the heart. And the Torah was the soul that kept the whole vessel from going under.
God summoned all twenty-two letters to testify against Israel. Before aleph could speak, Abraham stepped forward and argued them all into silence.
Adam held the entire Torah from the first day. When Cain proved unworthy to carry it, Adam waited two decades before Seth was born to receive it.
Haman left the queen's first banquet certain he was the only man in Persia she wanted at her table. He had one night left.
Doeg watched David receive bread and a sword at Nob, then turned twenty-two letters of Torah into the accusation that destroyed a city of priests.
Iron combs tear Akiva's flesh while he finishes the Shema, Hear O Israel, and heaven records his blood as a legal claim not yet settled.
Psalm 91 promised protection from the terror of night. The rabbis disagreed about what that terror was. Hezekiah lit every school in Jerusalem with Torah.
Resh Lakish was working as a robber when he saw Rabbi Yohanan in the river, leapt across, and never went back to the life he left on the bank.
God told Moses to give some of his glory to Joshua, not all. The rabbis built the entire theology of succession from that one missing word.
Moses sits in Rabbi Akiva's classroom and cannot follow the lesson. Then a student asks the source of the ruling, and Akiva says: Sinai.
Two spies lay flat under drying flax on a Jericho rooftop while the king's soldiers searched the river roads for them and found nothing.
The ruling Moses carried down the second time was about blood from a household slaughter. Pour it on the ground like water from a jug. Cover it with earth.
Ten spies came back saying the cities were walled and the men were giants. Two men said the land was good, and the crowd reached for stones.
Abraham had every right to the pasture. He gave it to Lot. The sages traced every disaster that followed to the moment the herdsmen first quarreled.
Under his feet was something like a pavement of sapphire, clear as the sky. The men who stood there did not die of it. They sat down and had a meal.
After the golden calf, God said He would send an angel instead of coming Himself. The people heard it, took off their ornaments, and never put them back on.
Tamar was about to be burned alive when her evidence vanished. She prayed, and God sent Michael to recover what had been lost before the sentence could fall.
When Joseph's brothers returned with Benjamin, he prepared a feast with sinew removed from the meat and seated eleven men in exact birth order.
Every Israelite could stand at the door of the Tent and watch. On went the robe, then the oil, then blood on Aaron's ear, thumb, and toe.
