The death of Rabbi Eliezer the Great was one of the most poignant moments in the entire Talmud. The sage who had been excommunicated by his own colleagues — placed under a ban because he refused to accept the majority ruling — spent his final hours demonstrating that his knowledge of Torah was as vast as the ocean itself.
The Talmud (Sanhedrin 68a, Shabbat 11a) records that as Rabbi Eliezer lay dying, his former students came to visit. He sat up in his bed and raged: "Why have you come only now? I have so much Torah to teach, and you have wasted years avoiding me because of the ban."
He told them: "If all the seas were ink, and all the reeds were pens, and all the people were scribes, they could not write down everything I have learned." His knowledge was limitless, yet the ban had kept students from receiving it. He wept — not for himself, but for the Torah that would die with him.
He foretold the future to each student who came. To Rabbi Akiba, he predicted a particularly painful death — and this prophecy was later fulfilled when the Romans executed Rabbi Akiba by flaying his skin with iron combs.
In his final moments, Rabbi Eliezer was asked about a question of ritual purity. He answered with a single word — "Tahor" — "Pure" — and his soul departed as the word left his lips. Rabbi Yehoshua stood and declared: "The ban is lifted!" But it was too late. The greatest reservoir of Torah knowledge in a generation had been sealed off by a legal dispute, and now it was lost forever.