The Rabbi Elijah Showed Both Heaven and Hell

The prophet Elijah never died. He ascended to heaven in a chariot of fire (2 Kings 2:11) and has been returning ever since — appearing at circumcisions, at Passover Seders, at the bedsides of scholars who ask him difficult questions. The rabbis of the Talmudic period speak of meeting him in marketplaces, on roads, in dreams. But no rabbi in Jewish legend walked as many hidden corridors with Elijah as Rabbi Joshua ben Levi, the great sage of the third century CE, who received from the deathless prophet guided tours of the three most consequential places a human soul can go.

These accounts are scattered across multiple ancient collections: the Chronicles of Jerahmeel (Gaster, 1899), compiled in the 12th century from far older sources; the Legends of the Jews (2,672 texts) compiled by Louis Ginzberg (1909–1938); and the Exempla of the Rabbis, a 13th-century collection assembled by Moses Gaster in 1924. Together they build a portrait of a sage whose unusual closeness to Elijah gave him access to knowledge no living person was supposed to possess.

What Elijah Showed Rabbi Joshua in Gehinnom

The first tour began simply. Rabbi Joshua ben Levi was walking on a road when he met Elijah. "Would you like to see the gates of Gehinnom?" Elijah asked. Rabbi Joshua said yes.

What the Chronicles of Jerahmeel XV preserves is not a vague description of torment. It is a systematic account of how punishment in Gehinnom — the place of spiritual reckoning after death, not to be confused with the eternal hell of other traditions — corresponds with exact precision to the sins committed by specific body parts in life.

Elijah showed him men hanging by their hair. These had grown their hair long to make themselves attractive for sin. Others hung by their eyes, for following their gaze into transgression. Others by their tongues, for slander. Others by their hands, for theft. Others by their feet, for running to do evil. Women hung by their breasts for deliberately enticing men to transgress.

Deeper in, men were forced to eat fiery coals — these had blasphemed. Others swallowed bitter gall for eating on fast days. Others ate fine sand until their teeth broke. God Himself addressed these last sinners directly: "When you ate stolen food it was sweet in your mouth. Now you cannot eat even this." Some were thrown from fire to snow and back again, endlessly — these had turned away the poor who came asking for help. Others were driven from mountain to mountain like sheep, with death itself serving as their shepherd.

Rabbi Johanan explained the system to Rabbi Joshua: for every sin, a specific angel is appointed to extract its expiation. Three categories of sinners descend to Gehinnom and never ascend — the adulterer, the one who publicly shames a neighbor, and the perjurer. But even Gehinnom observes the Sabbath. On Friday evening, the sinners are led to two mountains of snow and left there until Saturday night, when their punishment resumes. Some try to smuggle snow under their armpits to cool themselves during the week. God rebukes them: "You steal even in Gehinnom."

Why Rabbi Shimon ben Yohai Would Not See Him

The tradition records another encounter that reveals something about Rabbi Joshua's character that is easy to miss. According to the Legends of the Jews 7:67, Elijah once tried to arrange a meeting between Rabbi Joshua and the departed Rabbi Shimon ben Yohai — the great second-century sage to whom later tradition attributed authorship of the Zohar, the central text of Kabbalah.

Rabbi Shimon declined. When Elijah had posed a question to Rabbi Joshua and Joshua gave a modest, unassuming answer, Rabbi Shimon concluded that the man was not important enough to warrant his attention. The logic was the logic of the heavenly academy, where scholars are ranked by the sharpness of their formulations.

But here is the irony the tradition preserved. When Rabbi Joshua ben Levi entered Paradise, Elijah walked before him, calling out: "Make room for the son of Levi! Make room for the son of Levi!" The prophet who ascended in a chariot of fire was serving as a herald, clearing a path in Gan Eden for the man Rabbi Shimon had dismissed. The modesty that looked like a lack of substance from one angle was, from the angle of heaven, the mark of extraordinary worth.

The rabbis noticed this contrast deliberately. A scholar who answers questions with humility and a scholar who answers with dazzling precision are not equivalent in the academy of heaven. What counts in Gan Eden is not brilliance but the quality of the soul that produced the answer.

The Gates Made of Carbuncles

At some point in his many encounters with Elijah — the tradition does not specify the occasion, only that it happened — the prophet showed Rabbi Joshua something no living person had been shown: the future Jerusalem.

Not the Jerusalem of rubble and Roman occupation. Not the city whose Temple lay in ashes. The Exempla of the Rabbis, No. 201 records that Elijah showed him the Jerusalem that would exist at the end of days — the city rebuilt by God Himself, the one the prophets had promised would descend from heaven fully formed.

The gates and portals of that future Jerusalem were made entirely of carbuncles — enormous precious stones that blazed with their own light. Not torches, not oil lamps, not sunlight. The gates themselves radiated a brilliance so intense that the whole city was illuminated from within. No external source of light was needed. The walls glowed. The doorways burned with gemfire.

This vision corresponds to the prophecy in (Isaiah 54:12): "I will make your windows of rubies, your gates of carbuncles, and all your walls of precious stones." What Isaiah had described in words eight centuries earlier, Elijah showed Rabbi Joshua in full, blazing detail. The Talmudic tradition records that Rabbi Joshua ben Levi's relationship with Elijah was uniquely close — he met him regularly and received revelations that other sages could only interpret from afar. This vision of the carbuncle gates became one of the most beloved images in Jewish eschatology, a promise embedded in a sage's memory and passed down through the tradition as a lamp against darkness.

What Kind of Man Elijah Chose to Show

The Exempla of the Rabbis also preserves a wider tradition about Rabbi Joshua ben Levi and Elijah that traces the story's parallels across dozens of ancient collections — from the Pesikta to Maase Hashem to Seder Hadorot. The extensive cross-referencing gathered in No. 393 of Gaster's collection shows how widely this figure traveled in rabbinic imagination across centuries and geographies. Rabbi Joshua and Elijah appear together in sources ranging from early tannaitic compilations to medieval Hebrew chronicles, always carrying the same essential quality: the prophet who has seen everything chooses this particular sage to show it to.

The rabbis asked why. Of all the sages of the third century — and there were great ones — why did Elijah accompany Rabbi Joshua ben Levi on tours of Gehinnom and the future Jerusalem? Why did he walk before him into Paradise?

The answer the tradition implies, without quite stating it directly, is character. Rabbi Shimon ben Yohai had dismissed Rabbi Joshua as insufficiently brilliant. But Elijah, who had stood before God on Horeb (1 Kings 19:11) and ridden a chariot through the boundary between earth and heaven, was measuring something else. He was measuring the soul. And what he found in Rabbi Joshua ben Levi was a man humble enough to receive revelations without being destroyed by them, compassionate enough to understand Gehinnom's logic without flinching, and quiet enough to carry the vision of the carbuncle gates through the rest of his life without turning it into a boast.

That is the kind of person you take to see the gates of fire and the gates of light. Not the most dazzling. The most ready.