One of history's most enduring superhero stories begins with a sixteenth-century rabbi, river mud, and ancient mysticism. This episode traces the Golem from its single biblical appearance in Psalm 139, where it means unformed matter, through Talmudic passages describing Adam as a golem and the sage Rava creating a mute man, to the medieval mystics who read the Sefer Yetzirah as a technical manual for animating clay with the Hebrew alphabet.

The conversation explains the activation mechanism, writing emet, truth, on the forehead and erasing one letter to leave met, dead, and follows the earliest recorded golem maker, Elijah of Chelm, whose overgrown household servant crushed him when deactivated. It then reveals that the famous Golem of Prague attributed to Rabbi Judah Loew is a nineteenth-century literary invention, cemented by Yudel Rosenb ...