The Two Sages and the Angel of Death in Gaster's Exempla

One sage met the Angel of Death on the road home and was given two hundred more years. The other sage met the Angel of Death while pausing to study and died very young.

Both stories sit a few pages apart in The Exempla of the Rabbis, Moses Gaster's 1924 anthology of medieval Jewish folktales drawn from manuscripts spanning a thousand years. The two endings are not random. The Exempla preserves them as a pair, and the pair, read carefully, is teaching a single principle about how the Angel's appointments are kept.

The Sage Who Bought Two Hundred Years

Exempla 137 opens with Ben Sabar, a sage who had just helped an orphan marry. The Hebrew tradition treats marriage of the orphan as one of the highest forms of chesed, the lovingkindness for which heaven keeps no ledger of repayment because no repayment is possible.

Ben Sabar finishes the work and starts the journey home. The Angel of Death meets him on the road. The Aramaic of the exemplum is brief and exact. The Angel has come for him.

Ben Sabar does not flee. He goes instead to R. Shaffan ben Laish, the sage of his community. Something happens at that interview. The exemplum does not specify what. R. Shaffan blesses, or rules, or invokes. The story says only that Ben Sabar was saved from death through that first pious action of his. The marriage he had just orchestrated for the orphan was, retroactively, the credential by which he was permitted to live two hundred more years.

The teaching is not about merit accruing slowly. The teaching is that a specific deed, performed close to the moment of death, can rewrite the timing of the appointment. The orphan's marriage and Ben Sabar's two hundred extra years are, in the exemplum's economy, the same transaction.

The Sage Whom Heaven Was Calling

Exempla 220 tells the opposite story. Rabbah ben Nahman, the head of the academy of Pumbadita, is accused by the authorities of keeping people from work for two months by detaining them in the village for study. He flees.

The Angel of Death overtakes him while he is paused for study under a tree. The exemplum is careful about the reason. He was desired in heaven. The accusation against him in the lower world was the cover, perhaps, for an entirely different decree in the upper world. The Angel did not arrive because Rabbah ben Nahman was on the run. The Angel arrived because heaven had asked for him.

Birds, the exemplum continues, hover around the place where his body lies, casting a shadow over it. The shadow guides his disciples to find him. They mourn for three days in Pumbadita. A letter falls from heaven. Whoever returns home shall be excommunicated. They grieve seven more days. A second letter falls. Go home. A great tempest accompanies his death. He died young, the exemplum closes. He died poor.

Nothing about this story turns on a deed performed in the final hour. Rabbah ben Nahman was a great sage. He was beloved. He died anyway. The Angel of Death, in this exemplum, was sent by an instruction the earthly authorities knew nothing about.

Why the Index Around Ben Sabar Grew So Long

The third entry in this cluster is, like several other Exempla index entries, not a story. It is the citation list. Exempla 137 (alternate) lists where the Ben Sabar tale has been preserved across medieval Jewish folklore.

The list is long. Ben Atar's anthology. Eliyahu HaKohen's Meil Tzedakah. Jellinek's Beit HaMidrash. Eisenstein. The Maaseh Buch. Helvicus's seventeenth-century European retelling. Ben Gorion. Several manuscript codices.

Compare this to the much sparser citation index for Rabbah ben Nahman's death. The Ben Sabar tale was preserved everywhere. The Rabbah ben Nahman tale was preserved much more narrowly. The medieval Jewish reading public, in other words, demanded the story in which charity bought two hundred years far more often than the story in which heaven simply called a great man home.

The Two Endings, Held Together

Gaster's editorial choice to set the two tales in proximity is the teaching. Medieval Jewish folklore did not flatten the question of why some sages outrun death and others do not.

Ben Sabar lived because his last act was a charity that heaven recognized as full payment. Rabbah ben Nahman died because heaven wanted him, regardless of what he was doing on the way. Some deaths are summons. Some deaths are decrees that can still be deferred. The Exempla preserved both kinds.

The reader who finishes the cluster has not been given a formula. The reader has been given two adjacent tales, each true on its own terms, and the implicit instruction not to confuse them.