4,128 texts · Page 6 of 86
Nebuchadnezzar's first question to Ben Sira is bizarre. "How does the rabbit shave her head?" The answer Ben Sira gives connects this strange question to one of the most famous enc...
Nebuchadnezzar's second challenge to Ben Sira is deceptively simple. "Count the trees in my garden." The seven-year-old doesn't even need to look. "Thirty types of trees are in you...
Nebuchadnezzar doesn't believe Ben Sira actually knows what's in his garden. So the king proposes a test. He'll blindfold the boy, march his army past in separate battalions, and B...
Nebuchadnezzar wants to kill Ben Sira. He's just not very subtle about it. "I have a friend I hate," the king says, barely disguising his intentions, "and I want to kill him with f...
Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, had questions. Ben Sira had answers. And in the Alphabet of Ben Sira, a satirical medieval text composed between 700 and 1000 CE, no question was t...
Nebuchadnezzar noticed something odd about the human body and asked Ben Sira to explain it. Everywhere on the body, each hair follicle holds two hairs. But on the head, each follic...
Gnats live for a single day. They're born, they swarm, they die. New ones replace them. So why do they exist at all? Nebuchadnezzar wanted to know, and Ben Sira had a two-part answ...
King David once watched a wasp devouring a spider while a fool chased them both with a stick. And he complained to God about it. Why create wasps that sting for no benefit? Why cre...
Nebuchadnezzar asked Ben Sira a question that most people wouldn't think to ask: why does an ox have no hair on its nose? The answer, according to the Alphabet of Ben Sira (c. 700-...
In the beginning, the cat and the mouse were friends. Partners, actually. But according to the Alphabet of Ben Sira, a satirical medieval text composed between 700 and 1000 CE, the...
The Alphabet of Ben Sira, composed between 700 and 1000 CE, doesn't shy away from the crudest questions about the natural world. When Nebuchadnezzar asked why donkeys urinate on on...
The Alphabet of Ben Sira, a medieval text composed between 700 and 1000 CE, tells the longest and wildest origin story for why dogs and cats can't stand each other. It goes all the...
Any cat owner knows the feeling: your cat looks right through you like you're a stranger who happens to operate the food dish. According to the Alphabet of Ben Sira, composed betwe...
Look closely at a mouse's face and you'll notice fine lines running along its cheeks, almost like tiny stitches. The Alphabet of Ben Sira, a medieval text composed between 700 and ...
Watch a raven walk and you'll notice something peculiar. It doesn't strut smoothly like a pigeon or hop like a sparrow. It bobs and sways, almost like it's dancing. The Alphabet of...
The raven has a terrible reputation in Jewish tradition. Thief. Scoundrel. Untrustworthy. And according to the Alphabet of Ben Sira, a medieval text composed between 700 and 1000 C...
This is one of the greatest trickster stories in all of Jewish literature. According to the Alphabet of Ben Sira, composed between 700 and 1000 CE, every land animal has a correspo...
Jewish tradition holds that a handful of people never died. They walked into Gan Eden - the Garden of Eden - while still alive, bypassing death entirely. The Alphabet of Ben Sira, ...
The Thanksgiving Hymns (Hodayot, הודיות) are a collection of intensely personal poems found in Cave 1 near Qumran, composed sometime in the 2nd or 1st century BCE. Several of them ...
4QInstruction (Musar LeMevin, מוסר למבין, meaning "Instruction for the Understanding One") is one of the longest and most philosophically sophisticated texts found at Qumran. Prese...
Before Adam named the animals, God brought them before the angels and challenged them to do it first. They could not. Adam named every creature instantly. God turned to the angels ...
Abraham's entire family were idol-makers. They carved images and sold them in the streets. But Abraham ran the stall like a philosopher. According to the Chronicles of Jerahmeel, a...
Darius summoned Daniel to test his wisdom and found him seven times wiser than any report had claimed. According to the Chronicles of Jerahmeel, a 12th-century Hebrew chronicle tra...
The persecution was methodical and savage. According to the Chronicles of Jerahmeel, a 12th-century Hebrew chronicle preserved by Moses Gaster in 1899, Phillipos, the officer left ...
For sixty days and sixty nights, Enoch wrote without stopping. The archangel Pravuil — heaven's own scribe, the wisest of all the archangels — dictated to him the totality of creat...
God gave Enoch his mission — and a deadline. "Everything I have told you," the Lord said, "everything you have seen — from the lowest heaven to My throne, all the hosts and all the...
"My beloved children," Enoch said, "hear the admonition of your father — not from my lips, but from the lips of the Lord. Everything that is, was, and will be until the day of judg...
Enoch stood before his children and delivered a teaching that cut through every pretension: all the ways humans measure worth — wealth, wisdom, beauty, strength, youth, cunning, el...
Enoch made his children swear — but not by heaven. Not by earth. Not by any created thing. "The Lord Himself said: There is no oath in Me, nor injustice — only truth," Enoch told t...
Thirty years after Babylon burned Jerusalem to the ground, a man named Ezra lay on his bed in the city of his captors and could not sleep. His thoughts boiled. His heart raged. Bec...
"Many have been created, but few shall be saved." With those words ringing in his ears, Ezra launched into the most daring prayer in all of Jewish apocalyptic literature — a prayer...
On the third day, Ezra sat under an oak tree. A voice came from a bush opposite him. "Ezra, Ezra." He rose to his feet. "Here I am, Lord." The voice from the bush was deliberate. U...
It’s a question that might seem simple, even trivial. But in the grand tapestry of Jewish legend, even the proliferation of grass becomes a moment of profound theological significa...
It's quite the tale, and it all starts with the Phoenix. Now, we all know the story of Adam and Eve and the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge. But did you know that the animals got ...
It wasn't always this way! According to the legends, these creatures weren’t born rivals. Their animosity, like so much else in this world, has a story, a reason... or rather, seve...
He noticed the fox was missing. "Where's that sly one?" he probably grumbled. He soon found out the fox had cleverly avoided the census. Annoyed, Leviathan sent out some big, stron...
We often dismiss insects or animals as pests, but Jewish tradition teaches us a profound lesson: "Whatever God created has value." Even the creatures that seem useless or even noxi...
It kind of does. Imagine this: God, in His infinite wisdom, creates the universe. A dazzling display of stars, planets, oceans, mountains... but with a catch. A cosmic "Terms and C...
It’s not all harps and halos, let me tell you. Some of them… well, they weren’t exactly thrilled with the idea. According to Ginzberg's retelling in Legends of the Jews, there were...
A whole millennium! That was supposed to be Adam’s lifespan, a "day of the Lord," as it says in some traditions. But did you know he gave some of that time away? According to Legen...
We often think of him in the Garden of Eden, maybe naming animals, but according to tradition, his influence stretched far beyond that. It wasn't just the animal names Adam passed ...
We all know the story: God creates Adam, the first man. But did you know there’s a little-known prelude to the Eve story? According to some traditions, Adam actually had a differen...
At its heart, according to ancient tradition, stand two magnificent trees: the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge. Now, these aren’t just any ordinary trees. The Tree of Knowle...
It’s a pretty bleak picture, according to some traditions. Imagine Adam, hearing God’s pronouncement: "Thorns and thistles shall it bring forth." In other words, the ground would n...
That's what Adam had, according to tradition. He possessed a celestial light, allowing him to survey the entire world with a single glance. Pretty impressive. But then, he sinned. ...
To imagine the very first human, suddenly aware of his nakedness, his vulnerability, his mortality. What words could possibly capture that moment? Well, according to Ginzberg's ret...
Just three days after Adam poured out his heart in prayer, sitting by the river flowing from Gan Eden, the Garden of Eden itself, the angel Raziel appeared to him. Can you imagine ...
Some say it all started with an angel, a book, and a terrified first man. The story goes that the angel Raziel, whose name means "secret of God," descended to Earth bearing a very ...
