Tag: Spooky Midrash

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Korah and His Associates in Hell-A Spooky Tale from the Talmud

Korah and his associates go to hell.
Korah and his associates go to hell. An engraving by Gustave Doré.

In this final entry of “spooky midrash” (at least for 2020) we return to the Sinai desert for another adventure with our buddy Rabbah bar bar Hannah. In the last story, his trusty Arab guide showed him the desert dead. These were the gigantic corpses of the generation of Hebrews that died in the wilderness after rebelling against God and refusing to enter the Promised Land. Right after that story, in the Babylonian Talmud the guide offers to show Rabbah bar bar Hannah another group of Israelite rebels who suffer God’s vengeance, Korah and his associates.

BT Batra 74a (translation of Jacob Neusner)

“He said to me, ‘Come and I will show you those who were associated with Korah
who were swallowed up (Num. 16:32ff.). I saw two cracks that emitted smoke. I
took a piece of clipped wool and soaked it in water, put it on the point of a spear,
and pushed it in there. When I took it out, it was singed. He said to me, ‘Listen
closely to what you will hear,’ and I heard them say, ‘Moses and his Torah are
truth, and we are liars.’ He said to me, ‘Every thirty days Gehenna causes them to
turn over as one rotates meat in a pot, and this is what they say: “Moses and his
Torah are truth and we are liars.’’

Korah and His Associates in Hell

The desert dead were granted a kind of grace from God. The Babylonian Talmud depicted them clutching their prayer shawls until the day of resurrection. In contrast, Korah and his associates enjoy no such mercy. To understand why they are punished so severely, you really have to read about their rebellion in Numbers 16.

Even so, this story probably actually is about grace in its original Jewish context. In Judaism, Gehenna is usually purgative, not punitive. That may be why we hear Korah and his associates confessing their sin against “Moses and his Torah.” That is not the bitter cry of someone confirmed in their rebellion and wickedness, but the moan of anguish expressed by a broken heart.

Perhaps there is hope even for Korah and his associates. And if so, perhaps there is hope for me, as well.

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The Desert Dead-A Spooky Tale from the Talmud

For Halloween, I have been sharing a number of eerie stories from Jewish midrash in my “spooky midrash” series. So far we’ve encountered Torah zombies and Judah the Patriarch’s rattling bones. In this post I will introduce you to the desert dead.

Baba Batra-Discussions about Property Damages are Boring, So Let’s Tell Tall Tales

The story of the desert dead is found in the Babylonian Talmud, in a Tractate called Baba Batra, the “Last Gate” from the order of Nezikin, “Damages.” This is a section of the Talmud dedicated to questions of rights and responsibilities in regards to property. The Mishnah on which the Talmud is based has a lot to say about these things, so it divides them into three “gates.” Baba Batra is the last of these sections.

The property under discussion in BT Baba Batra 73B is technically ships and their tackle. The Mishnah is specifying here what equipment is included and what is not in the purchase of a ship. The Babylonian Talmud says, “Ships. Did someone say ships? Speaking of ships, I was on a ship once …” and then cuts loose with one tall tale after another about amazing things that this rabbi and that have seen at sea. The conversation continues to follow various rabbi rabbit trails until on page 73B, we hear all sorts of wonder stories that don’t have anything at all to do with ships at sea. Rabbah bar bar Hannah takes the opportunity to tell us a spooky story about the desert dead.

Rabbah bar bar Hannah’s Adventures in the Desert

But he starts off with a quite different kind of story. It seems that he was traveling through the Sinai desert, and they had an amazing guide to help them on their way. This guide had a very helpful olfactory talent.

BT Baba Batra 73B (Jacob Neusner’s translation)

A. And said Rabbah bar bar Hannah, “Once we were traveling in the desert, and a Tai-Arab joined us, who could pick up sand and smell it and tell us which was the road to one place and which to another. We said to him, ‘How far are we from water?’ He said to us, ‘Give me sand.’ We gave him some, and he said to us, ‘Eight parasangs.’ When we gave him some sand later, he told us that we were three parasangs off. I had changed the sand, but I was not able to confuse him.

That’s some trick! It reminds me of the old Western films I would watch as a boy, where the hero might be assisted by an intrepid Native American guide who could sniff the wind, look at the way the grass was crumpled, and tell him what direction the enemy had gone and how long ago.

The Desert Dead

It’s at this point that the guide offers to show Rabbah bar bar Hannah an amazing sight, the desert dead.


B. “He said to me, ‘Come on, and I’ll show you the dead of the wilderness’ (Num. 14:32ff).

They are in the wilderness of Sinai, and the guide wants to show Rabbah bar bar Hannah the corpses of those children of Israel who died in the wilderness due to their rebellion. Numbers 14 tells us that God cursed this generation. “32 But as for you, your dead bodies shall fall in this wilderness. 33 And your children shall be shepherds in the wilderness forty years, and shall suffer for your faithlessness, until the last of your dead bodies lies in the wilderness.” Evidently, because the text in Numbers does not specifically mention burial, a midrash developed that they were not buried, but lay where they fell. And the Babylonian Talmud develops this tradition further. God has preserved their bodies as a testimony to their rebellion. They are the desert dead.

I went with him and saw them. They looked as though they were exhilarated.

I’m not sure why Neusner translated the second sentence the way he did. The Aramaic pretty clearly says “drunk” for the word he translates “exhilarated.” I would translate it this way: “They looked as though they were in a drunken stupor.” I.e., they look more like people who have passed out than people who have died.

The Desert Dead Are Giants

[74A] They slept on their backs and the knee of one of them was raised. The Arab merchant passed under the knee, riding on a camel with a spear on high and did not touch it.

The “[74A]” tells us that we have gotten to the next page of the Babylonian Talmud. Ever since the Catholic printer Daniel Bomberg first printed the Talmud in the sixteenth century, folks have used the layout of his edition of the Talmud to find their way around this massive piece of literature.

Now we hear that the desert dead are actually giants. They are literally sleeping giants. They are so huge that the Arab guide can ride under one of their knees on his camel.

Dang. The Babylonian Talmud has some weird stuff in it. I really do not know what to make of this strange tradition.

Things really get spooky in the next bit.

I cut off one corner of the purple-blue cloak of one of them, but we could not move away. He said to me, ‘If you’ve taken something from them, return it, for we have a tradition that if anybody takes something from them, he cannot move away.’ I went and returned it and then we could move away.

So, that’s the chilling story of the desert dead.

The Prayer Shawls of the Desert Dead

Before we leave the tale entirely, the Talmud reminds us that this is a legal text, after all, and provides one last midrash concerning Rabbah bar bar Hannah’s motivations for taking the bit of fabric from the desert dead. Amazingly, he himself tells us about how the other rabbis ridiculed him when he shared this story with them.

C. “When I came before rabbis, they said to me, ‘Every Abba is an ass, and every son of Bar Hana is an idiot. What did you do that for? Was it to find out whether the law accords with the House of Shammai or the House of Hillel? You could have counted the threads and the joints [to find out the answer to your question].’”

So, it turns out that the cloak was actually a tallit, a prayer shawl. Rabbah bar bar Hannah had specifically cut off one of its fringes. There was a famous dispute between the two major pharisaical schools, that of Shammai, and that of Hillel, regarding the proper way to knot fringes. Rabbah bar bar Hannah happens to be in the vicinity of corpses wearing prayer shawls from the very generation that had originally received this commandment. (It appears in Numbers 15, the chapter directly following the one upon which this story is based). He decides to take advantage of this and settle the debate once and for all.

Unfortunately, he discovers that he can’t bring the fringe he has cut off back to the other rabbis after all. He tells them about the near opportunity that he had, and they ridicule him: “You big dope. You didn’t have to actually bring a fringe to us. Why didn’t you just count the threads and joints so you could describe them to us?”

Not Just a Ghost Story

There is something charming about this story in the end. The thought of the rebellious Israelites clutching their prayer shawls in repentance until resurrection day is deeply moving to me. God did not give them the grace to enter into the Land of Promise. But He did give the desert dead a lesser grace that is beautiful, nonetheless. No one can deprive them of their millennia long prayer session, as they lie dead but incorrupt in the wilderness of their wandering.

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Rattling Bones! A Spooky Story from the Talmud

The Tomb of Judah the Patriarch. Before he was buried here, in his coffin there were rattling bones.

I recently shared a text from the Jerusalem Talmud that is perfect for Halloween. Keeping up with the Spooky Midrash series, here is another one from the Babylonian Talmud, about rattling bones and prayer for the dead.

Judah and Reuben and the Confession of Their Shameful Sins

This text is from Tractate Sotah 7b. The legal text in question is all about the “straying woman” (sotah in Hebrew) whose husband subjects her to the bitter water ordeal in Numbers 5. This is a challenging and difficult set of legal texts that I hope to deal with at a future time, but in the middle of the discussion, the rabbis share a ghost story about rattling bones.

It begins with a citation from the Mishnah. There, the rabbis say that the priests conducting the ritual ordeal should tell the woman shameful accounts of past sinners, in an effort to get her to confess to adultery before going through the ordeal. The Babylonian Talmud asks what sort of accounts these are. (The translation that follows is from Jacob Neusner).

BT Sotah 7b
A. And they tell her things… [M. 1:4C]:
B. Our rabbis have taught on Tannaite authority:
C. He tells her lessons of narrative and events that took place [and are recorded] in the earlier writings [of the Pentateuch].
D. For example “Which wise men have told and have not hid from their fathers [by confessing their sin]” (Job. 15:18).

Rewards for the Confession of Sin

First of all, I probably ought to explain what “Tannaite” means. The Tannaim are the sages of the period most referred to in the Mishnah. Their period roughly covers 10-220 AD. The first of the Tannaim are Hillel and Shammai, and the last of them was Judah the Prince, who compiled the Mishnah. The Mishnah is the record of oral Torah teaching from this period. “Mishnah” and “Tannai” are from the same Semitic root, although the first is Hebrew and the second is Aramaic. Mishnah means “recitation” and Tannai means “one who recites.” So this section of Tractate Sotah asserts that its tradition comes from this most venerable period of Pharisaic Torah teaching.


E. Specifically: Judah confessed and was not ashamed to do so.
F. What was his destiny? He inherited the world to come.
G. Reuben confessed and was not ashamed to do so.
H. What was his destiny? He inherited the world to come.
I. What was their reward? What was their reward?! It was as we have stated [F, H].
J. Rather, what was their reward in this world?
K. “To them alone the land was given, and no stranger passed among them”(Job. 15:19).

Surprisingly, (perhaps), the shameful accounts are about two of the Patriarchs of Israel, Judah and Reuben. The Talmud only obliquely refers to them here. But you can go read all of the seamy details in Genesis 38 (Judah) and Genesis 35:22 and 49:4 (Reuben). I mean, they are shockingly scandalous stories. No one would want to know that their ancestors had done such things. The Bible is brutally honest in this way. This is not the sort of carefully edited propaganda that some critics have tried to depict it as being. But I digress.

Judah’s Good Example

Interestingly, the Talmud insists that there were both spiritual and material blessings for their confession of sin. They inherited the world to come, of course, but the rabbis produce a midrash based on Job 15, and imply that the inheritance of the tribes of Judah and Reuben in the land of Canaan was a direct result of confessing these sins.

But there is a bit of a problem. The Bible never tells us that Reuben confessed his sin. For the rabbis, who like for there to be a biblical foundation for all of their teachings, this is a major irritant. And so, the Babylonian Talmud provides us with a midrashic solution.

III.2. A. Now we find no problem in the case of Judah, for we find that he confessed, as it is written, “And Judah acknowledged them and said, She is more righteous than I” (Gen. 38:26).
B. But how do we know that Reuben confessed?
C. It is in accord with what R. Samuel bar Nahmani said R. Yohanan said, “What is the meaning of that which is written: ‘Let Reuben live and not die, and this for Judah’ (Deu. 33: 6-7)?

Rabbi Yohanan turns to Deuteronomy 33:6-7, where Moses blesses the tribe of Reuben, to find a hint that Reuben did indeed confess his sins. What he actually does here is fuse verse 7, which begins the next blessing, on to verse 6. By so doing, he generates a new text. Not only is Moses asking that Reuben be given life, but he is asking that Reuben be blessed for the sake of the confession prompted Judah.

Judah’s Rattling Bones

And now we get to the rattling bones. Here the Talmud provides a strange story to give testimony to the statement that Reuben confessed his sins because of Judah. You might expect a midrash that actually recounts Reuben’s confession. But no, this is the Babylonian Talmud, so it’s going to be delightfully weirder.

The story that follows depends on a non-biblical tradition. The Bible specifically tells us that the Hebrews brought the bones of Joseph the Patriarch with them out of Egypt. But it doesn’t tell us what happened to the bones of the other Patriarchs. So the midrash that follows assumes that all of their bones were also carried with their descendants throughout the wilderness wanderings. This is the premise for a wonderfully creepy story about Judah’s rattling bones.

D. “All those years that the Israelites were in the wilderness, the bones of Judah were rolling around in the coffin, until Moses went and sought mercy for him, saying before him, ‘Lord of the ages, who caused Reuben to confess? It was Judah [who set the example].’
E. “‘And this for Judah.’ Forthwith: ‘Hear, O Lord, the voice of Judah’ (Deu. 33: 7).
F. “Each limb then entered its socket [and stopped rolling about].
G. “But they did not bring him up into the Torah-session in the firmament.
H. “[Moses then prayed], ‘And bring him in to his people.’
I. “But he could not follow the give and take of the argument [that rabbis were discussing concerning the law].
J. “[Moses prayed]: ‘With his hands let him contend for himself’ (Deu. 33: 7).
K. “He had no tradition in hand pertinent to what was under discussion in the law.
L. “[Moses prayed:] ‘Be a help against his adversaries’ (Deu. 33: 7).”

Praying for the Dead-Settling Rattling Bones Down

There it is, the story about Judah’s rattling bones. And isn’t it fantastic? I’m telling you, rabbinic literature is a treasure trove of such wonderful things. I routinely find it to be deeply edifying for my own, specifically Christian spirituality. This story is just one good example. I especially like how the blessing for the tribe of Judah in Deuteronomy 33 has become a series of intercessions in the mouth of Moses for the deceased Patriarch. And, of course, this is colorful testimony that the ancient Christian practice of praying for the dead is a natural development from our Jewish roots.

The Tomb of Judah the Patriarch. Before he was buried here, in his coffin there were rattling bones.
The Tomb of Judah the Patriarch. Photo by Ariel Palmon, CC BY 3.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

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Torah Zombies!

Tomb of Rabbi Hillel on Mt. Meron. The Jerusalem Talmud says that when we pass on his teaching in his name, he becomes a Torah Zombie!

I am a big fan of rabbinic literature, and I love sharing its delights with others. So, here is an eerie text from the Jerusalem Talmud that is perfect for the Halloween season. It’s all about Torah Zombies!

The translation below comes from Jacob Neusner’s monumental translation. “R.” is “Rabbi.”

Torah Zombies in Jerusalem Talmud, Seder Zera’im, Tractate Berakhot

[II:3 A] Now R. Yohanan required that [his students] attribute his teachings to him [whenever they repeated them]. [B] Accordingly, even King David [implied that a person who repeats his words attribute them to him]. He asked [God] for mercy, “Let me dwell in thy tent for ever!” [Ps. 61:4]. [C] [How should one interpret this verse?] R. Pinhas, R. Jeremiah in the name of R. Yohanan, “Did it ever cross David’s mind that he would live forever? Rather so said David, ‘Let me merit that my words be spoken in my name in the synagogues and in the study halls.’”

Don’t Plagiarize. It Makes the Sages Sad. Help Them to Become Torah Zombies!

The discussion about Torah Zombies begins with an innocuous enough teaching. It is well known that rabbinic literature piles attributions on one another. A sage rarely provides a teaching without citing the rabbi from whom he received it. Often the sage produces a chain of authority reaching back two or even three generations. (The text exemplifies this itself when it has Rabbi Pinhas citing Rabbi Jeremiah in the name of Rabbi Yohanan). Here the Jerusalem Talmud says plainly that Rabbi Yohanan actually required this style of attribution of his disciples.

Then the Jerusalem Talmud provides a scriptural midrash as support. It asserts that this is precisely what David is praying for in Psalm 61 when he begs God to allow him to live in His tent for ever. He is asking to have his words spoken in the synagogues and study halls of the Jewish people. And he is also asking that when his words are spoken, he be given proper attribution for them. (So, the Bible condemns plagiarism, kids).

Naturally enough, the audience wants to know why this should matter to sages after they die. What possible benefit could there be to attributing a teaching to a sage after he has gone to his reward? Doesn’t death remove you from the sphere of honor and reward? Apparently not. When someone teaches Torah in your name after you die, you have the distinct honor of becoming a Torah Zombie. Check out what the Jerusalem Talmud has to say about this.

Reciting the Tradition from the Grave

[D] And what benefit is there [in attributing a teaching to another sage]? [E] Levi bar Nezira said, “When one recites a tradition in the name of its original author [who has passed away], the author’s lips move in unison with him in the grave [reciting the tradition. On account of the attribution the author merits a moment of life after death in the world to come].”

Tomb of Rabbi Hillel on Mt. Meron. The Jerusalem Talmud says that when we pass on his teaching in his name, he becomes a Torah Zombie!
The Cave-Tomb of Rabbi Hillel and His Disciples on Mt. Meron, Israel

Torah Zombies! The idea is that by providing proper attribution to your master after his death, you actually give him with a moment of resurrection. As a result, when you quote him, he revives, and speaks with you from the grave. Cool!

The idea of Torah Zombies is hard to swallow, of course. So the Jerusalem Talmud immediately provides another scriptural midrash.

[F] What is the scriptural basis for this teaching? “[And your kisses are like the best wine that goes down smoothly] gliding over the lips of sleepers [Song 7:9].”[After death one’s lips move] like the wine which glides off of grapes ripening in a basket [if someone recites a teaching in his name]. [G] R. Haninah bar Papai and R. Simon [explained the verse cited above]. [H] One said as follows, “Compare this [case in the verse] to one who drinks [spiced] conditon-wine.” [I] And the other said, “Compare this [case in the verse] to one who drinks aged wine.” Even though he finished drinking, the taste remains on his lips. [So too, one who recites Torah. The words remain on his lips after his death. When others repeat the tradition in his name, his lips move along with theirs.]

Torah’s After-Taste

So, teaching Torah is like drinking good wine with a pleasant after-taste. If we drink Torah in this life, we continue to taste it in the next one. And that turns you into a Torah Zombie.