Interspersed with the legal material that constitutes much of the Talmud are narratives—ranging from tales about the rabbis themselves, to illustrations of real-life applications of legal principles, to expanded versions of biblical stories, to legends about Alexander the Great. In The Land of the Truth: Talmud Tales, Timeless Teachings, the scholar Jeffrey Rubenstein presents fourteen of these stories, alongside his own analysis. Yitzchak Blau, in his review, praises Rubenstein for his clarity and insight, and offers as an example his reading of this characteristically bizarre tale:

According to the Lebanese government, the explosion in its capital city on Tuesday that left over 100 dead and many more injured or homeless was caused by the accidental detonation of some 2,750 of ammonium nitrate, a fertilizer often used for making bombs. (Less than one-thousandth of that amount was used by Timothy McVeigh to destroy the Oklahoma City federal building in 1995.) Previously, police have discovered Hizballah warehouses in London and Germany storing many tons of the same explosive. Hussein Ibish comments: