Samael, the Ten Sages, and the Goat Sent to a Dark Place

Rabbi Ishmael said: All these warnings and all these conditions were made known to and laid upon Samael the wicked, and he said: I have taken all upon me, provided only that ten of the mighty shall be destroyed.

The ten names that follow are not strangers. They are Rabbi Akiva ben Joseph, who was tortured with iron combs and died saying the Shema. Rabbi Judah ben Baba, who ordained students in defiance of the Roman prohibition and was killed by soldiers. Rabbi Hananya ben Teradyon, who was wrapped in a Torah scroll and burned alive. Rabbi Ishmael ben Elisha, who was one of the greatest legal scholars of the tannaitic period. Rabbi Shimon ben Gamaliel, the Nasi who led the academy. And five others, each a giant of the second-century rabbinic world, each killed by Rome in the generation after the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE.

The text that preserves this tradition, among the earliest layers of what would become the literature of Heikhalot and Merkavah mysticism, presents the deaths of the Ten Martyrs not as historical accidents or as the random cruelty of empire, but as the result of a deal. Samael agreed to accept all the conditions laid upon him. His price was ten great lives.

Who is Samael, and what conditions had been laid upon him? The second text, drawn from early Kabbalistic and midrashic literature on the structure of the human body and the cosmos, places Samael with precision. His dominion is in the liver. The liver, in ancient physiology and in the symbolic anatomy of the Kabbalistic tradition, is the organ that collects the impurities of the blood, that receives what the rest of the body cannot use. It is dark and rich and receives everything. Samael's hosts are the veins of the liver, and they serve him as an army.

The teaching on Samael and the patriarchs connects him to Esau, to Edom, to the verse in Genesis 36:1 that identifies Esau as Edom. Samael is the guardian angel of Esau in the rabbinic understanding, the cosmic force aligned with the empire of Edom, which is the rabbinic name for Rome. The ten sages were not killed arbitrarily by Rome. They were the price that the cosmic force behind Rome had extracted for agreeing to accept the constraints placed upon him.

The scapegoat sent to Azazel on Yom Kippur, described in Leviticus 16:22, carries the sins of Israel to a gezerah, an uninhabited land, a place of decree. The text cited in connection with Samael and the patriarchs plays on the word gezerah, noting that it is related to the word for decree of the watchers in Daniel 4:14. The place where the scapegoat is sent is the place of divine decree, the place where the cosmic justice that operates outside the normal framework of the world is settled. Samael has a claim on that goat, on that place, on that settling of accounts.

The tradition makes Samael neither simple villain nor simple agent. He is, as the Kabbalistic tradition consistently emphasizes, a power that operates within the divine order. The conditions placed upon him are real constraints. He must agree before he can act. The bargain he drives, the ten lives for his agreement to accept limitations, is a bargain made within a legal framework. He is Ha-Satan in one dimension, the accuser, the prosecuting force in the heavenly court. He is the guardian of Esau, the cosmic force aligned with empire and with the powers that crush Israel from the outside. And he is the force that governs the liver, the organ that takes in what cannot be used and holds it.

The account of Samael's bargain is preserved in the literature surrounding the liturgical poem Eleh Ezkerah, the lament for the Ten Martyrs recited on Yom Kippur. The poem imagines a heavenly court scene in which the deaths of the sages are decreed because someone must pay for the sin of Joseph's brothers selling him into slavery, a sin for which the Torah prescribes a particular penalty that was never executed. The ten sages pay the debt of the ten brothers. Samael is the collector.

Jacob was a tam, a perfect man, as Genesis 25:27 describes him. The scapegoat's sins are the avonot tam, the sins of the perfect one. The goat that carries Israel's sins to the wilderness is sent to the place of the gezerah, the decree, to settle a cosmic debt that runs through Jacob and his sons and through the long history of exile that followed. Samael stands at the intersection of all these threads: the liver that holds what cannot be metabolized, the force behind the empire that crushes Israel from without, the prosecutor who holds the right to exact payment for unpaid debts, and the power who finally agrees to accept constraints in exchange for ten of the greatest souls in a generation.

The tradition does not present this as tragedy alone. The Ten Martyrs died sanctifying God's name. Each one of them chose how to die, and each one of them died with the Shema on their lips. Samael won the bargain. Israel got something back that Samael could not price: the example of how to die without surrendering. That, the rabbis said, was worth more than anything Samael had gained.