37 myths · Page 1 of 2
The eternal struggle with the evil inclination in Jewish thought, the two impulses that drive human nature, and the path to mastering desire.
37 myths on JewishMythology.com retell how Jewish tradition imagines yetzer hara (evil inclination), 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.
Pressed against the back wall of a cave, knife drawn, Saul within reach, David asked God for two mercies. The second one was the strange one.
Three advisors stood before Pharaoh. One fled, one stayed silent, and Balaam found the loophole that drowned Hebrew babies in the Nile.
Korah told the crowd about a widow whose field and flock went to Aaron piece by piece. Every law he cited was real. The widow was not.
Trapped between Pharaoh's chariots and the sea, Israel faced a second hunter in heaven: Samael the accuser, whom God quieted by throwing him Job.
Laban chased Jacob to Gilead to wipe out his house, and the same hunter rose again as Balaam, the Devourer of Nations, mouth open over Israel.
Two sisters argued in a field in Haran over a handful of apples. The price they settled on was one night with their husband, and the child was Issachar.
When God formed Adam and commanded the angels to honor him, Ha-Satan, the Accuser, refused. Formed from fire, he would not bow before dust.
Esau never moved his lips. The murder plot stayed sealed in his heart, three deaths in careful order, until God spoke every word of it aloud.
God gave Adam one command about one tree. Adam built a fence around it. Then the serpent shook the trunk, the fruit fell, and nothing died.
He had crossed the Jordan with nothing but a staff and been given everything after that. Then a king asked his age and got a complaint.
The angels surrounded the Throne and demanded the Torah stay in heaven. Moses gripped the footstool and made his case to their faces.
Adam lay dying and sent his wife and son to the gate of Eden for oil. On the road, an animal knocked Seth down and argued with Eve.
David's sin with Bathsheba was real. The rabbis did not look away. But they also asked why God would allow the most righteous king to fall this far.
Ham saw his father's nakedness. His brothers walked backward to cover Noah. The Tikkunei Zohar turned this into a map of desire.
A tradition in Talmud and Kabbalah says Adam was not Cain's father. Samael seduced Eve in the Garden, and the murder of Abel was written into Cain's blood.
Samael did not tempt from outside the Garden. He entered. A folktale explains how the yetzer hara, the evil inclination, found its home in the human heart.
Benjamin gathered his sons at the end of his life and returned to the oldest wound in the human story. What Adam and Eve failed to understand, he named plainly.
For three days the sages held the yetzer hara, the evil inclination, captive in a lead pot, and found that without desire the world could not reproduce.
Akiva had watched the ship go down. He came to court so the man's widow could remarry, and the man he had seen drown walked in and stood in front of him.
No one crowned him. He took the throne in the first wail and the first grasping fist, and held it thirteen years before a barefoot boy came to the gate.
Eve wakes screaming from a dream of Abel's blood, and every step Adam takes to keep his sons apart only walks them toward the first murder.
A blind man and a lame man strip the kings figs, then each blames the other. The soul tries the same defense and learns it grew up at court.
Satan built a face no man could resist and set it in the rabbi's doorway, so Matya took white-hot nails and burned out his own eyes.
A seducer thinks he has cornered a woman, and a demoness thinks she has cornered a tzaddik, a righteous man. Both fall to one turn of mind.
A vast soul is told to diminish like the moon before it can wear a body. Closed inside cloudy flesh, it climbs back by deeds alone.
She had a fist in his linen and four words ready. He twisted out of the garment and left it with her, and she kept it beside her all afternoon.
A heretic split Ameimar's body between two gods at the belt; Ameimar answered with one Name and a world that has no second throne.
At midnight two kings pull a man's limbs. One rules from the brain, one from the left heart, and neither will share his body.
He sailed to bankrupt himself on purpose. Providence filled every box, and the road kept every stone he threw away.
A lion ordered a dog to kill a spider. The spider went to the lion for help, and the lion took its side. Akiva stood in the road and watched it happen.
