Moses Arrived in Heaven and the Angels Panicked

The Talmud says Moses ascended into heaven to receive the Torah. The rabbis who thought hardest about what that meant concluded it must have been terrifying for everyone involved. including the angels.

Ginzberg's Legends of the Jews, drawing on a web of midrashic and hekhalot sources spanning the third through eighth centuries CE, describes the ascent in stages. God commanded the angel Metatron. who is also Enoch, the seventh generation from Adam, the man who "walked with God" and was taken (Genesis 5:24), transformed from flesh into the Prince of the Face. to escort Moses through the heavenly realms. Thirty thousand angels accompanied them: fifteen thousand on his left, fifteen thousand on his right. This is not an honor guard. It is a buffer. Moses was a human being about to walk through a place that was not built for human beings, and the angels needed to be somewhere they could intervene.

Moses was terrified. He cried out to Metatron: who are you? And Metatron said: I am Enoch, son of Jared, your ancestor. At which point Moses was still terrified, because he was flesh and blood and could not look upon the countenance of an angel. So Metatron transformed him. His flesh became torches of fire. His eyes became wheels of the divine chariot. the Merkabah (מרכבה). those spinning, eye-covered celestial wheels from Ezekiel's vision. His tongue became a flame. His strength became an angel's. Only then was he led inside.

In the first heaven, Moses saw windows. Not windows to look out of but windows into the structure of existence: a window for prayer, a window for supplication, for weeping, for joy, for plenitude, for starvation, for wealth, for poverty, for war, for peace, for conception, for birth, for showers and soft rains, for sin, for repentance, for life and death. Everything had its window. Every state of being had its place in the architecture of heaven, maintained by angels.

In the third heaven, Moses encountered something the mind resists scaling. An angel so large it would take five hundred years to climb from its feet to its head. It had seventy thousand heads. Each head had seventy thousand mouths. Each mouth had seventy thousand tongues, and each tongue was producing constant praise. Around this being stood seventy thousand myriads of angels made of white fire. Metatron identified them: the Erelim, assigned to oversee grass and trees and fruits and grain. They serve, return, praise. Serve, return, praise.

And then, at the end of forty days, when Moses had learned the Torah and was ready to descend, the angels met him with fury. Angels of terror, angels of trembling, angels of quaking and horror surrounded him, and Moses was so overwhelmed that he forgot everything he had learned. Every word. Gone. God called on the angel Yefefiyah. the Prince of the Torah. who restored it, handed it over "ordered in all things and sure." The angels who had been hostile became allies. Each one gave him a gift: remedies, the secrets of holy names, even the Angel of Death offering Moses something against death itself. The knowledge passed through Metatron to Moses, from Moses to the High Priest Eleazar, from Eleazar to Phinehas, who is also Elijah.

The chain of transmission is the point. The Throne of Glory is where prayer was supposed to arrive, where the fate of nations was supposed to be decided. and the tradition records that when Israel prayed for Moses not to die, a hundred and eighty-four myriads of angels intercepted the prayers and kept them from reaching God. An angel named Lahash tried to let them through. Samael reported him. He was punished with sixty blows of fire and expelled from the inner chamber. Even within heaven, there are politics, blocked paths, competing forces.

Moses walked through all of this. He walked through as a man transformed into fire, escorted by thirty thousand angels, terrified and forgetting and recovering and receiving gifts. When he came back down, he carried the Torah in his hands and his face shone so brightly the Israelites could not look at him directly.

The angels panicked because the Torah was theirs first. It had been in heaven before the world existed. Now a human being was taking it down to earth. The tradition records that they demanded God not give the Torah to flesh and blood. Moses responded by pointing out that nothing in the Torah applied to angels: they do not go out to Egypt, they do not serve other gods, they do not covet their neighbor's wife. The Torah was written for creatures who can fail. The angels had no use for it. They fell silent.

Moses brought it down. The thirty thousand fell back. The fire in his flesh banked down to a glow. He stood at the foot of the mountain, the same man, bearing everything.