The physical strength of Rabbi Elazar ben Shimon was legendary, but it was after his death that the most astonishing miracle occurred. The Talmud (Bava Metzia 84b) records that when Rabbi Elazar died, his wife did not bury him immediately. Instead, she kept his body in the upper room of their house — and for years, possibly decades, it did not decompose.
His wife would sit by the door of the upper room, and whenever a legal dispute arose in the town, the litigants would come to the house. They would present their cases at the door, and a voice would emerge from the room where Rabbi Elazar's body lay, issuing rulings. Whether it was the sage's spirit or a divine echo of his wisdom, the Talmud does not say. But the rulings were always correct.
One day, his wife found a worm emerging from his ear and was horrified. But Rabbi Elazar appeared to her in a dream and said: "Do not worry. This happened because I once heard a scholar being insulted and did not protest." Even the smallest failure to defend another person's honor carried consequences — even in death.
When the other sages finally learned that Rabbi Elazar's body had been kept unburied, they arranged for his proper burial. As the funeral procession passed through town after town, people came out to pay their respects to a sage whose body had defied nature itself. His strength in life was physical; his strength in death was spiritual — and the Talmud presents both as manifestations of the same extraordinary soul.