12 myths
The destructions, exiles, and catastrophes of Jewish history as refracted through Midrash, Talmud, and the literature of lament.
12 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.
Jacob sees the bloody coat and refuses to be comforted. Twenty-two years later the refusal still holds. The rabbis explain why.
Robbing one coin is equal to killing, says Vayikra Rabbah. Saul's erasure of Nov shows what happens when a king mistakes the reach of power for justice.
Nebuchadnezzar's arrows all turned toward Jerusalem. When his army arrived it found blood in the Temple courtyard still boiling after centuries of waiting.
King Jehoiakim cut apart the scroll of Lamentations piece by piece, erasing every divine name before burning it. Jeremiah wrote four more chapters.
A third-century sage reading Lamentations notices that Jacob's name appears in every verse of destruction and refuses to let it pass.
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.
The daughter of Jerusalem's greatest philanthropist, once allotted five hundred gold dinars a day, forages for barley in the streets.
A mother once gave her son's weight in gold to the Temple. When Jerusalem starved, the siege turned that gift inside out.
Ahasuerus knew Mordecai wanted the Temple rebuilt. He elevated the most virulent enemy of the Jews he could find as a counterweight.
Thirty years after Babylon burned Jerusalem, Ezra could not sleep. He put God on trial, demanded an answer, and the angel who responded refused to give him one.
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.
