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Two Sages Met the Angel of Death and Only One Walked Away

Ben Sabar earned two hundred more years by helping an orphan marry. A younger sage was taken mid-study, desired above, and mourned for three days.

Curated by Arthur · Told by Maggid ·
Table of Contents
  1. The Sage Who Helped an Orphan Home
  2. What Two Hundred Years of Borrowed Life Means
  3. The Sage Who Was Desired Above
  4. Why Both Stories Sit Together

The Sage Who Helped an Orphan Home

Ben Sabar was walking home from a wedding he had arranged for an orphan girl who had nothing, no family, no dowry, no one to act on her behalf. He had given what was needed and made the match, and now the work was done and he was on the road.

The Angel of Death was waiting for him on that road. His time had arrived. The angel said so.

Ben Sabar did not argue with the angel. He went instead to Rabbi Shaffan ben Laish, the great sage of his community, and threw himself at the sage's feet. Something happened in that meeting. The Exemplum does not say what. It says only that Rabbi Shaffan examined the matter and declared that Ben Sabar's act of chesed, the helping of an orphan to marry, a kindness for which heaven keeps no ledger because no repayment is possible, had earned him more time. The Angel of Death could not take him.

The exemption lasted two hundred years.

What Two Hundred Years of Borrowed Life Means

The medieval storytellers who preserved this account in Moses Gaster's 1924 anthology of Jewish folktales were not recording a fantasy. They were recording a principle. In the tradition of these stories, a single act of selfless kindness performed at the right moment can intercept a divine decree.

The orphan had no parents to arrange her wedding. Ben Sabar had no obligation to help her. That gap between obligation and action, the space where a person does more than required, is the exact space where these tales locate divine response. What made the Angel's appointment invalid was not legal argument but the size of what Ben Sabar had done on the day he was supposed to die.

The Sage Who Was Desired Above

The other story in Gaster's collection sits only a few pages away, and it ends differently. Rabbi b. Nahman had been accused of keeping people from their work for two months, detaining them in a village for study. The charge drove him away from the community. But flight could not help him.

The Angel of Death caught him while he had paused to study, in the very act that had defined his life. He was taken mid-text, mid-thought, mid-sentence. The Exemplum says he was desired above. This was not punishment. This was the heavenly court wanting him back before he had time to arrange his own exemption.

His disciples found the body because birds circled the place and cast shadows over it. Creation disclosed what he had not announced. The natural world bent to mark his resting place, and his students mourned him for three days in the field before carrying him home for burial.

Why Both Stories Sit Together

Moses Gaster placed these two tales in sequence deliberately, and the Exempla of the Rabbis, his 1924 compilation drawing on manuscripts spanning nearly a thousand years of Jewish storytelling, preserves many such adjacent pairs. The proximity itself carries the weight. Taken one at a time, each story gives a partial answer about death and righteousness. Set side by side, they refuse to flatten the question.

Ben Sabar's kindness bought him two centuries. Rabbi b. Nahman's learning brought him early to the place where learning originates. Neither ending is a verdict on the other. The collection holds both without harmonizing them, because the Angel of Death in these tales does not operate on a logic that any single story can exhaust.

TzedakahLoveExempla Of The RabbisGasterAngel Of DeathBen SabarRabbah Bar Nahman
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From the tradition

Sources

4 sources

The texts this telling draws on, in full. Open a card to read inline, or expand it for a wider, quieter read.

Exempla of the Rabbis, No. 137Exempla of the Rabbis (Gaster, 1924)

This brief tale, preserved in the medieval collection that Moses Gaster edited as the Exempla of the Rabbis, turns on the principle that a single act of loyal kindness can hold back a death already decreed. Its hero is a man called Ben Sabar, and the deed that defines him is that he helped an orphan to be married. In Jewish tradition the marrying off of an orphan, a young person with no parents to provide a dowry or arrange the match, is counted among the highest forms of charity, since the giver expects nothing in return and acts only to build up a vulnerable household in Israel.

The story tells that on his journey home, after performing this kindness, Ben Sabar was met by the angel of death, who had come to take his soul. Rather than surrendering, he went to the sage Rabbi Shaffan ben Laish for counsel and protection, and through the merit of that very first pious action, the marrying of the orphan, he was rescued from death. The reward was not only escape from the immediate decree: he was granted life for two hundred additional years.

The lesson the tale carries is the rabbinic conviction that charity rescues from death, an idea drawn from the verse "charity delivers from death" (Proverbs 10:2). The man's good deed is not merely remembered; it actively intervenes when the angel comes, and the sage's role is to point him toward the merit he had already earned. The exaggerated span of two hundred years marks, in the language of legend, just how heavily a selfless act on behalf of the helpless weighs in the heavenly accounting.

Full source
Exempla of the Rabbis, No. 220Exempla of the Rabbis (Gaster, 1924)

This tale from the Exempla of the Rabbis, the anthology of short rabbinic stories edited by Moses Gaster, recounts the death of R. b. Nahman. He had been accused of keeping people away from their work for two months and detaining them in the village, a charge that drove him to flee. Yet his flight could not outrun heaven, for he was desired above. The Angel of Death overtook him while he had paused to study, catching him in the very act that defined his life as a sage.

His body was hidden, but creation itself disclosed it. Birds hovered around the spot and cast a shadow over the place where he lay, and by this sign his disciples found him. The detail honors him: the natural world bent to mark and shelter the resting place of a man wanted in heaven.

His students mourned him for three days in Pumbedita, the great Babylonian center of learning. Then a letter fell from heaven warning, "Whoever returns home shall be excommunicated," and so they grieved a further seven days. Only when a second heavenly letter fell, saying "Go home," did they depart. A great tempest accompanied his death. The story closes by noting that he died very young and was very poor, a sage cut short in years and means yet held precious in the courts above.

Full source
Exempla of the Rabbis, No. 137Exempla of the Rabbis (Gaster, 1924)

Ben Sabar was traveling home one evening when he came upon a young orphan girl weeping by the side of the road. She had no family, no dowry, and no one willing to marry her. Without a moment's hesitation, Ben Sabar took her under his protection and arranged everything she needed for a proper wedding, clothing, a dowry, a feast, a groom.

On his journey home after the wedding, Ben Sabar encountered a terrifying figure blocking the road. It was the Angel of Death, and he had come for Ben Sabar's soul.

"Your time has arrived," the angel said.

Ben Sabar, trembling but thinking quickly, fled to the house of Rabbi Shaffan ben Laish, a great sage known for his piety. He threw himself at the rabbi's feet and begged for help.

Rabbi Shaffan examined the matter and declared that Ben Sabar's act of kindness, rescuing an orphan and giving her the dignity of marriage, had generated such merit in heaven that the Angel of Death had no power over him. The decree was reversed.

The angel departed empty-handed. And Ben Sabar did not merely survive that night. According to the medieval folk tradition preserved in the Maase Buch (No. 200), he lived for another two hundred years, a staggering extension of life, granted not for prayer or fasting or scholarship, but for one spontaneous act of compassion toward a forgotten orphan on a dark road.

Full source
Exempla of the Rabbis, No. 398Exempla of the Rabbis (Gaster, 1924)

This is the story of Ben Sabar, a man known for his great charity, who traveled to a distant place to perform the mitzvah of bringing joy to a young couple at their wedding. The tale weaves together several themes the rabbis loved: the protective power of good deeds, the patience of a righteous death, and the hospitality of one sage toward another.

On his return Ben Sabar crossed safely over the back of a dragon that lay stretched across the lake, a creature that had killed everyone else who came that way. His charity, the storyteller implies, shielded him where others perished. But protection from the beast did not mean protection from his appointed end. He was met by an ugly stranger who was in truth the Angel of Death, come to take his soul. Ben Sabar asked only to be allowed to go home first and put his house in order, a request granted to the worthy.

On the way he came to the dwelling of the sage Shephiphon ben Laish, who sheltered him. A cloud descended and surrounded the house, and the Angel of Death demanded the pledge that had been promised him. Shephiphon refused to surrender his guest and instead claimed a reward on Ben Sabar's behalf. God granted the sage's plea and prolonged Ben Sabar's life. The Exempla of the Rabbis attaches the tale to a related story for comparison, and its message is that charity and the intercession of a righteous host can win, from Heaven, even a stay against death itself.

Full source