8 myths
The destructions, exiles, and catastrophes of Jewish history as refracted through Midrash, Talmud, and the literature of lament.
8 myths on JewishMythology.com retell how Jewish tradition imagines tragedy, 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.
Jehoiakim fed Jeremiah's scroll to the winter fire, column by column, but God sent Baruch back to write the words again.
Jacob sees the bloody coat and refuses to be comforted. Twenty-two years later the refusal still holds. The rabbis explain why.
The people carry two names, Jacob and Israel. Lamentations uses only Jacob when it describes ruin, and Resh Lakish wanted to know why.
A rabbi enters a Roman prison to test a captive child with a verse, and what the boy answers changes the course of a life.
The richest woman in Jerusalem lays carpets from her door to the Temple so her feet never touch the ground, until one day they must.
A mother once gave her son's weight in gold to the Temple. When Jerusalem starved, the siege turned that gift inside out.
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.
Nebuchadnezzar's arrows all turned toward Jerusalem. When his army arrived it found blood in the Temple courtyard still boiling after centuries of waiting.
