66 myths · Page 1 of 3
Gehinnom, Sheol, and the Jewish traditions about punishment after death, purification of the soul, and the fate of the wicked.
66 myths on JewishMythology.com retell how Jewish tradition imagines gehinnom, drawn from the Hebrew Bible, Midrash, Talmud, Kabbalah, and later Jewish literature. Each story below synthesizes primary sources into a single narrative; follow any myth to read it, and from there into the source passages behind it.
Abraham cuts the covenant animals at God's command. When darkness falls, fire passes through the pieces and shows him hell.
A Bedouin showed a Talmudic sage the fissures where the earth swallowed Korah alive. Every thirty days Korah surfaces and cries out that Moses was right.
Inside the gate the angel Dumah waits. A soul arriving there has to say aloud its own name, its father's house, and the sin that brought it there.
Moses saw the place of divine judgment on the same tour that showed him heaven. What he saw was not chaos. It was an exact inventory of social failures.
No dust rose outside the tent. God opened a hole in Gehinnom, the afterlife of judgment, so heat would keep travelers away while Abraham healed.
Before Moses left heaven with the Torah, God showed him both Paradise and Gehenna (afterlife of judgment). The fires retreated when he approached.
Before Moses died, he saw mud, fire, venom, and souls held by the limbs that sinned. Gehinnom (afterlife of judgment) had a terrible order beneath mercy.
David repeated Absalom's name in grief, and the midrash counts each cry as one door opened in Gehinnom, the afterlife of judgment, for his lost son.
Moses walked to warn Datan and Aviram before the earth opened. They would not come out to meet him. He gave the warning and left them to the ground.
The drawn sword outside Jericho carried an old refusal. Moses had turned away the angel, but Joshua bowed low enough to receive him.
Before Adam was cursed and expelled, Shabbat stepped forward and argued against the first death. Then nine curses fell, and the silent earth received one too.
Isaiah asked God to show him Gehinnom (afterlife of judgment). God showed him five chambers, each punishment fitted exactly to the sin. Pharaoh sat at the.
Ahaz closed the schools first, then sealed the Temple doors. He changed his clothes and took the long way around any street where Isaiah stood.
Korah recruited followers with a story about a widow and her one field. Moses took the first fruits, then the tithe, then the wool off her two sheep.
The earth opened beneath their father and they were left suspended on a ledge inside Gehinnom (afterlife of judgment), and from there they composed the psalms.
He came back from the war with his nephew alive and the plunder recovered, and somewhere on the road he worked out that he was ruined.
The fire that fell on Sodom from the sky had a partner rising from Gehinnom (afterlife of judgment) beneath. Both were prepared before the world began.
Lot stood in his own doorway doing sums. The gold, the gems, the whole house, all of it staying behind. Then an angel took him by the wrist.
Hagar walked away so she would not watch the boy die. Their water had run out. God heard the boy, not her, and showed her a well.
Korah looked into the future and saw Samuel and twenty-four Temple singers coming out of his own line. He decided God would never let their father die.
Saul spared Agag and lost the throne. Solomon multiplied wives and gold for forty years and kept it. The rabbis traced the difference to a single word.
Rabbi Joshua ben Levi descended through all seven chambers of Gehinnom (afterlife of judgment) and returned. Solomon never went himself, but he sent his.
Joseph buried gold in four places in the desert and told nobody. A few generations later a Levite named Korah found one of them and started spending.
At the gates of Gehinnom (afterlife of judgment), two angel bands call out a single word forever, and beyond them lie seven named compartments of fire.
Two angels named for silence stand at the edges of the Jewish cosmos, one below in the pit, one above at the palace threshold.
The scribe opens the ledger at the bedside and counts the days out loud. Nobody has ever won that argument, and only one animal hears the scream.
On Friday night, two angels walk home with you from synagogue, one good, one accusing, and which one speaks first depends on what they find inside.
At death an angel names each limb and mourns the acts it performed. Then a farmer, a goldsmith, and a Torah scholar face what they actually own.
A man gathering firewood in the forest was dead. He burned in Gehinnom (afterlife of judgment) because of a shared sin, and only his son's voice in the.
One wind blew all night at the sea. It dried a road for Israel and drowned Egypt in the same water. The rabbis called that one act, seen twice.
