There are other familiar motifs. Moses qualifies as a husband for Zipporah by alone being able to pluck a rod from Jethro’s garden; David’s harp is played at night by the wind, like that of Aeolus; and Isaiah, like Achilles and Siegfried, has only one vulnerable spot in his body—in his case, his mouth.
Legends are developed also from fanciful interpretations of scriptural verses. Thus, Adam is said to have fallen only a few hours after his creation, because the Hebrew text of Psalms 49:12 can be literally rendered “Adam does not last the night in glory.” Lamech slays the wandering Cain—a fanciful interpretation of his boast in Genesis 4:23–24. Melchizedek is immortal, in view of Psalms 110:4: “You are a priest for ever after the order of Melchizedek.” And the first man is a hermaphrodite (this notion has analogues elsewhere), because Genesis 1:27 says of God’s creation, “Male and female he created them.” Fables and animal stories
Midrash also uses fables paralleled in non-Jewish sources. Aesop’s fable of The Lion and the Crane is quoted by a rabbi of the 1st century ce, and the tales of The Fox in the Vineyard and of The Camel Who Got Slit Ears for Wanting Horns likewise make their appearance. Material is also drawn from medieval bestiaries (manuals on animals, real or imaginary, with symbolic or moralistic interpretations). Bears, according to the bestiaries, lack mother’s milk; hares and hyenas can change sex; only one pair of unicorns exists at a time; and there is a gigantic bird (ziz) that reaches from earth to sky. Contribution of Haggada to Christian and Islamic legends
Several of the stories related in Haggadic literature were later adapted by Christian writers. The legend that Adam was created out of virgin soil was taken to prefigure the virgin birth of the second Adam (i.e., Jesus); while the story that the soil in question was taken from the site of the future Temple was transformed into the claim that Adam had been molded out of the dust of Calvary. Similarly, the legend that, at the dedication of the Temple, the doors swung open automatically to admit the Ark of the Covenant was transferred to the consecration of a church by St. Basil (329–379); and the Talmudic tale that the bronze Nicanor gates of the Temple had floated to Jerusalem when cast overboard during their shipment from Alexandria was applied to the doors of a sacred edifice erected in honour of St. Giles (fl. 7th century).
Nor was it only the Christians who absorbed Haggadic legends. The Qurʾān, the sacred book of Islam, likewise incorporates a good deal of such material in its treatment of biblical characters such as Joseph, Moses, David, and Solomon. Myth and legend in the medieval period Jewish contributions to diffusion of folktales
The Middle Ages was a singularly productive period in the history of Jewish myth and legend. Medieval Jews played a prominent role in the transmission of Middle Eastern and Asian tales to the West and enhanced their own repertoire with a goodly amount of secular material. Especially in Spain and Italy, Arabic versions of standard collections of folktales were translated into Hebrew and then into Latin, thus enabling the stories to spread to the Christian world. The Indian collection of animal tales known as The Fables of Bidpai (Sanskrit: Panca-tantra), for example, was rendered into Hebrew from the 8th-century Arabic version of ʿAbd Allāh ibn al-Muqaffaʿ; and, in the 12th century, John of Capua’s Directorium humanae vitae (“Guide for Human Life”), one of the most celebrated repositories of moralistic tales (exempla) used by Christian preachers, was developed from this Hebrew translation. So too the famous Senbād-nāmeh (“Fables of Sinbad”)—one of the sources, incidentally, of Boccaccio’s Decameron—was rendered from Arabic into Hebrew and then into Latin. The renowned romance of Barlaam and Josaphat—a Christian adaptation of tales about the Buddha—found its Jewish counterpart in a compilation titled The Prince and the Dervish, adapted from an Arabic text by Abraham ben Samuel ibn Ḥisdai, a leader of Spanish Jewry in the 13th century. Hebrew versions of medieval romances
Hebrew translations were also made from Latin and other European languages. There are several Hebrew adaptations of the Alexander Romance, based mainly (though not exclusively) on a Latin rendering of the Greek original by Callisthenes (c. 360–327 bce). The central theme is the exploits of Alexander the Great, and the narrative includes fanciful accounts of his adventures in foreign lands and of the outlandish peoples he encounters. There is a Hebrew reworking of the Arthurian legend, in the form of a secular sermon in which Arthurian and biblical scenes are blithely mixed together. Finally, there is a Hebrew Ysopet (the common title for a medieval version of Aesop) that shares several of its fables with the famous collection made by Marie de France in the late 12th century. Jewish contributions to Christian and Islamic tales
Apart from these Hebrew translations of Arabic and European works, a good deal of earlier Haggadic material is embodied in the Disciplina clericalis of Peter Alfonsi (died after 1122), a baptized Jew of Aragon originally known as Moses Sephardi. This book is the oldest European collection of novellas; it served as a primary source for the celebrated Gesta Romanorum (“Deeds of the Romans”) of the same period—itself a major source for European storytellers, poets, and dramatists for many centuries.
Haggadic material was also absorbed by Arabic writers during this period. Not only does the Qurʾān incorporate such material, but the Egyptian recension of The Thousand and One Nights seems to have drawn extensively on Jewish sources. Its tales of The Sultan and His Three Sons, The Angel of Death, Alexander and the Pious Man, and the legend of Baliqiyah most likely come from a Jewish source. Major medieval Hebrew collections
From the 11th to the 13th century, comprehensive collections of tales and fables were compiled in Europe, both for entertainment and edification; standard examples are the Spanish El novellino and the aforementioned Disciplina clericalis and Gesta Romanorum. Jews, especially in Morocco and in Islamic Spain, produced similar collections. Two of the most important were The Book of Comfort by Nissim ben Jacob ben Nissim of Al-Qayrawān (11th century) and The Book of Delight by Joseph ben Meir ibn Zabara of Spain (end of the 12th century). The former, composed in Judeo-Arabic, is a collection of some 60 moralizing tales designed to comfort the author’s father-in-law on the loss of a son. Belonging to a well-known genre of Arabic literature and derived mainly from Arabic sources, it is permeated by a preoccupation with divine justice, which was typical of the Muʿtazilite school of Islamic theology. It was later translated into Hebrew. The Book of Delight consists of 15 tales, largely about the wiles of women, exchanged between two travelling companions—a form of cadre, or “enclosing tale,” later adopted on a more extensive scale in the 14th century in the Canterbury Tales by Chaucer (c. 1342–1400). Typical is the tale of The Silversmith and His Wife, which relates how a craftsman, persuaded by his greedy wife to make a statue of a princess, gets his hands cut off by the king for violating the Islamic law against making images, while his wife reaps rich rewards from the flattered princess. Although most of the stories are taken from Arabic sources, some have parallels in rabbinic literature—including the famous tale of the matron of Ephesus, who, while keeping vigil over her husband’s tomb, makes love with a guard posted nearby to watch over the corpses of certain crucified robbers. When, during one of their trysts, one of the corpses is stolen and her lover therefore faces punishment, the shrewd woman exhumes the body of her husband and substitutes it. This tale is found already in the Satyricon of Petronius (died 66 ce) and was later used by Voltaire (1694–1778) in his Zadig and by the 20th-century English playwright Christopher Fry in his A Phoenix Too Frequent.