51 myths · Page 1 of 2
Gehinnom, Sheol, and the Jewish traditions about punishment after death, purification of the soul, and the fate of the wicked.
51 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.
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.
On Day One God kindled time and fire from the dark, and on Day Two split the waters and made the angels out of His own throne flame.
The fire that fell on Sodom from the sky had a partner rising from Gehinnom beneath. Both were prepared before the world began.
The Book of Jubilees makes a stark claim: God loved Ishmael and was with him as he grew, and also did not choose him. Both were true.
Abraham saw judgment, hospitality, circumcision, and the furnace of Gehinnom together, then kept pressing heaven for mercy.
Before Adam hid among the trees, Gehinnom already waited at creation's edge. Confession, not denial, opened the way past it.
After defeating four kings, Abraham fell into existential crisis, convinced his military victory had spent every righteous act he ever performed.
When Lot hesitated at Sodom's threshold, the angels seized him by the hand. Abraham's merit was the rope that pulled him out.
A frog who was Lilith's child gave Yochanan the speech of every bird and beast, bought him a place at court, and sent him after a golden-haired princess.
Two robbers cry favoritism, a wicked man buys eternity with one hour, and in Ashkelon two funerals carry the wrong men to the wrong graves.
Two sages traced the dark that pinned Egypt to the blackness God hides behind, a coin-thick scoop of the deep that doubled once it was loosed.
The east wind that opens the sea for Israel also feeds the fires of Gehinnom, and it answers differently depending on who is standing before it.
The Holy One walled three directions and left the north open, stacking fire and ice beside the pit, while one man climbed past the sky to argue.
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.
Before Moses left heaven with the Torah, God showed him both Paradise and Gehenna. The fires retreated when he approached.
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.
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.
David sings hatred for the congregation of evildoers in Psalm 26, and the rabbis name the congregation: it is Korah's, which gathered in the shape of holiness.
Three hundred mules carried the keys to Korah's treasure houses. The earth opened and took him. His sons were spared and composed psalms from inside Sheol.
The earth swallowed Korah whole before the entire congregation of Israel. The rabbis could not stop wondering what came after the ground closed over him.
A nation that kindles a great stake at dawn and dusk meets the demon their fire was feeding, and Samriel opens the gate.
Before Moses died, he saw mud, fire, venom, and souls held by the limbs that sinned. Gehinnom had a terrible order beneath mercy.
The drawn sword outside Jericho carried an old refusal. Moses had turned away the angel, but Joshua bowed low enough to receive him.
David repeated Absalom's name in grief, and the midrash counts each cry as one door opened in Gehinnom for his lost son.
Seven fiery chambers where lions eat the dead and begin again, traitor-kings warden the nations, and scorpions with countless mouths lash the prostrate.
The rabbis could not place Solomon in paradise or Gehinnom. They placed him at the gate between them, which is where he had always lived.
Rabbi Joshua ben Levi descended through all seven chambers of Gehinnom and returned. Solomon never went himself, but he sent his workforce there instead.
Moshe walks Gehinnom where worms five hundred parasangs long withhold death, then rises to Rigyon, the carbuncle gates, and the couch where the Messiah waits.
Isaiah asked God to show him Gehinnom. God showed him five chambers, each punishment fitted exactly to the sin. Pharaoh sat at the gate of the last one.
King Ahaz closed the Temple, burned his own son as an offering, and disguised himself in Jerusalem's streets to avoid walking past the prophet Isaiah.
