The Man Who Toured Hell and the King Who Built Above It

Two people in the tradition managed to visit Gehinnom and return: Rabbi Joshua ben Levi and, in a sense, Solomon — who never went himself but sent his workforce there instead.

These are the two great underworld expeditions in Jewish literature, and they come from utterly different directions. One is a sage seeking knowledge. The other is a king seeking labor. Together, they form a picture of Gehinnom (גֵּיהִנֹּם) that no single source could supply alone.

Rabbi Joshua's Descent

Rabbi Joshua ben Levi was one of the great Talmudic sages of third-century Palestine. He was known for his encounters with the supernatural — he had spoken with the prophet Elijah, had attempted to meet the Messiah at the gates of Rome, had a reputation for walking where other rabbis would not go. What he wanted was simple: he wanted to see Gehinnom.

The Messiah refused to show him. It is not fitting for the righteous to see it, he was told. There are no righteous people in hell. But Rabbi Joshua pressed the matter, and eventually the angel Qipod escorted him to the gates.

The Chronicles of Jerahmeel, a twelfth-century Hebrew chronicle compiled by Jerahmeel ben Solomon, records what he found: seven compartments, each more terrible than the last, each organized according to a precise correspondence between sin and punishment. Men hanging by their tongues had used speech to destroy others. Women hanging by their hair had displayed it to seduce. Those submerged in rivers of fire had worshipped false gods on earth. The punishment in every case was not arbitrary suffering but an exact reversal — the part of the person that had served destruction now bore the weight of that choice.

A parallel account in the same Chronicles has Elijah himself as the guide, describing the same chambers in different words. Men hung by their eyelids had looked at what they should not have seen. Men hung by their ears had listened to gossip and spread it. The systematic quality of the vision is its most striking feature: Gehinnom is not chaos. It is the completion of a pattern that began in life.

Solomon's Construction Project

While Rabbi Joshua descended to observe, Solomon approached the underworld as an engineer approaches a difficult site. He needed to build the Temple, and the Temple could not be built with iron tools — iron, the metal of war, could not be used to build the house of peace. The solution was the Shamir, a worm smaller than a barleycorn that could split stone without touching it. To find the Shamir, Solomon needed information. The only beings who knew where it was kept were the demons — specifically Asmodeus, king of the demons, who ruled a domain that overlapped with Gehinnom's geography.

The Legends of the Jews trace this confrontation in detail: Solomon's men found Asmodeus at a mountaintop well, drugged his water with wine, chained him when he fell asleep, and brought him to Jerusalem. The interrogation that followed was one of the strangest diplomatic exchanges in Jewish literature. Asmodeus, chained in the king's palace, answered questions and made observations about Solomon that the king did not want to hear. He told Solomon that the four cubits of ground every person eventually occupied were the only real possession any human being had — kings included. Then he broke free, flew Solomon to the ends of the earth, and for a period the tradition debates, a demon sat on the throne of Israel wearing the king's face.

What the Two Expeditions Reveal

The Legends of the Jews record that demons built the Temple under angelic command, supervised by a ring bearing God's seal, which Solomon wore to compel them. The holiest structure in Israel's history was constructed by beings from the realm where Rabbi Joshua had seen sinners punished. The stone was cut by a creature that had been hidden for generations. Nothing about the Temple's construction followed obvious logic.

Rabbi Joshua returned from his tour with knowledge. Solomon obtained from his demonic workforce a completed sanctuary. The two expeditions — the sage and the king — produced different products from the same source material. One came back with understanding of how justice works after death. The other came back with the architectural plans of God's earthly home.

The apocryphal traditions surrounding both figures — compiled in works ranging from the Testament of Solomon, written in the early centuries CE, to the Chronicles of Jerahmeel from medieval Europe — agree on one thing: Gehinnom is not the end of the story. Rabbi Joshua emerged. Solomon's Temple rose. The underworld, for all its weight and fire, was a place people passed through on the way to something else.

The sage went to see. The king sent workers. Both of them changed something in the world above because of what was done below.