Rabbi Meir, on his yearly pilgrimage to Jerusalem, used to lodge with Judah the butcher, whose wife took loving care of him. One year Judah's wife died. Judah remarried, and when Rabbi Meir arrived the following season, Judah begged him to lodge with them again.
Rabbi Meir was a famously handsome man. The second wife fell in love with him. One evening she gave him wine and deceived him — he, drunk, mistook her for his own absent wife. In the morning Rabbi Meir awoke and understood what had happened. He returned to his own city weeping, went to the Rosh Yeshivah — the head of the academy — and asked what punishment he deserved.
The Rosh Yeshivah ruled that Rabbi Meir must be exposed to lions and eaten. Two men were instructed to bind him hand and foot, lay him in the forest, and watch from a tree to see what happened. If the lions ate him, they were to gather his bones for honorable burial.
The first night a lion came, sniffed him, and walked away. The men reported this to the Rosh Yeshivah, who ordered a second night. The second night a lion came and roared but did not attack. A third night was decreed. That night a lion tore out a small piece from Meir's side. The Rosh Yeshivah ruled this was equivalent to having been torn apart. The physicians were summoned. When Meir healed, a bat kol — a heavenly voice — proclaimed, "Rabbi Meir is worthy of the bliss of the world to come."
The midrash also remembers another story from the same compilation: a woman was falsely accused of adultery by her jealous husband and was to undergo the ordeal of the bitter waters in the Temple (Numbers 5:11-31). Her innocent twin sister, who looked exactly like her, took her place. The ritual found nothing wrong. But when the accused woman kissed her sister in thanks on coming home, the sister inhaled her breath — which carried in it the guilt the waters were meant to find — and the sister collapsed, revealing the truth anyway.
Gaster's Exempla of the Rabbis (1924, No. 384, from the Midrash of the Ten Commandments) preserves these two stories together as meditations on guilt and truth. A scholar repents by facing lions. A twin's innocent kiss becomes a polygraph. Truth, the tradition insists, is stitched into the bones of the world; it cannot be outsourced or disguised forever.