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The Eye That Outweighed Alexander's Entire Treasury

Alexander followed a fragrant stream to the end of the earth, reached the gate of Eden, and was turned away with a bone and a riddle.

Curated by Arthur · Told by Maggid ·
Table of Contents
  1. Salt Fish in a Strange Stream
  2. The Gate With the Flaming Sword
  3. What the Scale Would Not Do
  4. A Handful of Dust
  5. The Gate He Could Open
The Eye That Outweighed Alexander's Entire Treasury Click for full size

Salt Fish in a Strange Stream

He had stopped at the stream to eat. Alexander's men set out the salted fish they had carried up from the coast, and one of them rinsed a fish in the running water, and the smell that came off it was not fish. It was sweet, and it went on getting sweeter. He knelt and drank and stood up feeling better than a man has any right to feel at the end of a march.

"This water comes from the Garden of Eden," he said. "Find where it starts."

So they went up along the bank against the current, which is the slow way to travel and the only way that arrives at a source.

The Gate With the Flaming Sword

The water came out from under a gate, and an angel stood at it with a sword of fire. The men who had followed Alexander across Persia went and hid themselves.

He stayed where he was, in front of a sword that was on fire, and gave the gate the order he had given every other gate. "Open the gates for me."

"This is the gateway of the Lord," the angel said. "The righteous shall enter through it" (Psalms 118:20).

Alexander had opened every gate he ever came to, most of them with men and engines and some of them with nothing but his name sent ahead to the wall, so he tried the name here as well. "I am a king, and a highly regarded one at that. Give me something."

The angel gave him an eye. A human one, out of a skull, and that was the whole of what he got for the march upriver.

What the Scale Would Not Do

Back in camp he called for a balance, because a thing with no obvious use can still be weighed, and weight was something he understood. He put the eye in one pan and gold in the other.

The beam did not move, so he had them bring more gold, and after the gold the silver, and after the silver the stones, until the sacks were coming in from the tents where the treasury of an empire travelled, and the pan with the eye in it stayed down on the table.

He stood over the balance while they poured in the last of it. Gold went over the lip of the pan and onto the ground, and nobody bent to pick any of it up, since there was no point now in adding a handful to a hill. The beam did not move.

A Handful of Dust

Nobody in the camp could tell him what he was looking at, so he carried the eye back up the bank to the gate and asked the angel what he had been given.

"The eye of a human being is never satisfied," the angel said.

Alexander wanted it proved, so the angel told him to take dust and cover the eye and watch what happened, and he did it with his own hand, a scoop of ordinary dirt off the ground where he was standing, spread over the thing in the pan.

The gold dropped. It dropped hard enough to knock the table, and the other pan came up light and swung there, and the eye that had outweighed everything a man could conquer now weighed what a scrap of bone weighs. Nothing had been taken off the scale. A handful of earth had been added, the same handful that gets thrown in at the end of every life, and the arithmetic of the whole business changed.

The Gate He Could Open

He did not stop wanting. He had himself carried above the clouds in a box pulled by eagles to see what was up there, and from that height the world was a ball with the sea coiled round it. He went down into the sea in another box to see what was under that, and learned that even the monsters keep to borders.

Then the rabbis warned him not to go into Babylon. He was sick by then, and he went in anyway, through the one gate in the whole story that opened when he came to it. After him his kingdom was broken and divided toward the four winds of heaven (Daniel 11:4).

The stream kept coming out sweet from under the gate that stayed shut.

AlexanderGarden Of EdenAngelsWisdomMoralityTalmud
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From the tradition

Sources

3 sources

The texts behind this telling. Some cards carry a translation of the source; others are our own retelling of it, and each card says which. Every card links out to the original.

Tamid 32bTalmud Bavli, Tamid

Translation of the source text.William Davidson Edition - Vocalized Aramaic · CC-BY-NC

He said to them: Do people eat bread of gold? They said to him: But if it was bread you wanted, was there no bread to eat in your own place, that you took up and came here? When he was departing and going away, he wrote upon the gate of the city: I, Alexander of Macedon, was a fool until I came to the country of Africa of the women, and I learned counsel from women.

When he was traveling and going, he sat at a certain spring, eating bread. He had in his hand salted fish; while they were rinsing them, a fragrance fell upon them. He said: Learn from this that this spring comes from the Garden of Eden. Some say: He took from those waters and dashed them on his face. Some say: He went up along its whole length until he reached the entrance of the Garden of Eden. He raised his voice: Open the gate for me! They said to him: "This is the gate of the LORD" (Psalms 118:20).

He said to them: I too am a king, I am considered important; give me something. They gave him a single eyeball. He brought it, he weighed against it all his gold and silver together, and it did not equal its weight. He said to the Rabbis: What is this? They said: It is the eyeball of a human being of flesh and blood, which is never satisfied.

He said to them: From where do you know that this is so? They took a little dust and covered it, and immediately it was balanced in weight, as it is written: "Sheol and Abaddon are never satisfied" (Proverbs 27:20).

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Pirkei DeRabbi Eliezer 11:18Pirkei DeRabbi Eliezer

Retold in our words. Read the original at the link below.Pirke de Rabbi Eliezer, trans. Rabbi Gerald Friedlander, London (1916) · CC-BY

Jewish tradition tells us about a figure who embodied that very yearning: Alexander the Great.

You might be thinking, "Alexander the Great? Isn't he, you know, Greek?" He is indeed a historical figure of Macedonian origin. But in Pirkei DeRabbi Eliezer (Chapter 11), an early medieval text that retells and expands upon biblical narratives, Alexander gets a bit of a Jewish makeover. He becomes a symbol, almost a mythical figure, representing the ultimate ambition of humankind.

This teaching paints a picture of Alexander as a ruler whose dominion stretched "from one end of the world to the other." And the text finds support in the Book of Daniel (8:5), where a he-goat is described coming "from the west over the face of the whole earth." Notice that the verse doesn’t just say "over the earth," but "over the face of the whole earth." The Pirkei DeRabbi Eliezer sees this as a direct allusion to Alexander's expansive power.

It wasn't enough for Alexander to conquer the known world. Oh no. His ambition knew no bounds.

He wanted to ascend to the heavens, to undo the secrets of the cosmos. He wanted to plumb the depths of the earth, to understand what lay hidden below. He even tried to reach the ends of the earth, just to know what was there.

But here's the thing: the verse says, such limitless ambition isn't necessarily a good thing. In fact, the story takes a somewhat somber turn.

Pirkei DeRabbi Eliezer goes on to say that God, blessed be He, ultimately divided Alexander's kingdom among the "four corners (or winds) of the heavens." This echoes another verse from Daniel (11:4): "And when he shall stand up, his kingdom shall be broken, and shall be divided towards the four winds of the heaven."

So, what's the message here? Perhaps it's a cautionary tale about the limits of human ambition. Maybe it's a reminder that even the greatest empires eventually crumble. Or perhaps it's a commentary on the futility of seeking absolute knowledge – that some mysteries are best left untouched.

Whatever the interpretation, the story of Alexander in Pirkei DeRabbi Eliezer offers a fascinating glimpse into how Jewish tradition can take a historical figure and transform them into something far more profound: a symbol of humanity's eternal quest for knowledge, and a meditation on the consequences of unchecked ambition.

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Jewish Fairy Tales and Legends, King Alexander's AdventuresJewish Fairy Tales and Legends (Landa, 1919)

Retold in our words. Read the original at the link below.Project Gutenberg eBook #26711 · Public Domain

Alexander conquered the world and still had to stop at a gate he could not open.

Landa's 1919 retelling gathers the Jewish Alexander legends into one restless journey. First, Alexander comes toward Jerusalem, and the high priest Jadua leads the people out to meet him. The conqueror bows when he sees the priest, because the same image had appeared to him before battle as a sign of victory.

Jerusalem survives. Alexander honors the Temple, hears Jewish legal answers against foreign claims, and then asks the sages how to go farther than any ruler has gone. He wants the land beyond the Mountains of Darkness, the heavens above the clouds, and the monsters below the sea.

The journey gives him wonder but not possession. He reaches the gate of Paradise and receives only a skull-like reminder that human desire is never satisfied until earth covers it. He flies upward in a box drawn by eagles and sees the world like a ball, with the seas coiled around it like the Leviathan. He descends into the sea and learns that even monsters have borders.

The rabbis warn him not to enter Babylon. At the end, sickness and ambition push him through the forbidden gate anyway. The man who found Paradise cannot enter it. The man who saw the round world cannot keep even one command that would save his life.

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