At Gehenna's gate Joshua ben Levi saw (ib. I. 148, cf.
Exodus Rabba, § 40) persons hung up by their noses, others by their hands some
by their tongues, some by their eyelids and feet, women by their breasts. At
one place men were devoured by worms that die not: at another, coals of fire
burnt up their inner parts. Some ate dust that broke their teeth- they had
lived on stolen goods; and others were cast from flames into ice, and back
again. Each sin had its own chastising angel, the three deadly sins mentioned
being adultery, insulting a fellow-man in public, and the name of God. All the
faces were black, and in the very midst of their suffering the Jewish
sinners would declare God to be a just Judge, and be rescued after twelve
months, while the heathen, failing to do so, would have their punishment
renewed every six months. From Friday eve to the close of Sabbath, however, the
fires of Gehenna are cooled down, and they themselves find a cooling place
between two mountains of snow. Gan Eden he describes (II. 92) as a city with
two gates of carbuncle, above which sixty myriads of angels, with faces like
the firmament. stand with crowns of gold and precious stones, and with
myrtle-wreaths in their hands, to welcome each righteous man as he enters, and
lead him to his tent, where wine and honey from the world's beginning are
spread before him on costly tables. (K. Kohler, “The Pre-Talmudic Haggada.
II. C. The Apocalypse of Abraham and its Kindred,” The
Jewish Quarterly Review 7, no. 4 [July 1895]: 595-96, italics in original)
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