Rabbi Hanina ben Dosa was one of the most pious men in all of Israel, a miracle worker whose prayers could heal the sick and whose poverty was legendary. One day, the people of his town came to him in a panic. A deadly scorpion had taken up residence in a hole near the road, and it had already killed several people who passed by.
Rabbi Hanina walked to the spot, examined the hole, and did something that made the onlookers gasp. He placed his bare heel directly over the mouth of the scorpion's burrow and stood there, waiting.
The scorpion, provoked, crawled out and sank its stinger into Rabbi Hanina's foot.
The crowd braced for the sage to collapse. Instead, it was the scorpion that dropped dead on the spot. Rabbi Hanina picked up the lifeless creature, slung it over his shoulder, and carried it to the study hall.
"Look," he said to his students, holding up the dead scorpion. "It is not the scorpion that kills. It is sin that kills." A person bitten while steeped in transgression will die from the venom. A person bitten while steeped in righteousness will survive — and the scorpion itself will perish.
The Talmud in Berakhot (33a) records this incident alongside a popular saying that arose in its wake: "Woe to the man who meets a scorpion, but woe to the scorpion that meets Rabbi Hanina ben Dosa." His holiness was so concentrated, so total, that the natural world bent around it. Venom could not penetrate what sin had never touched.