Elisha Ben Abuyah - The Four Who Entered The Pardes

The Four Who Entered The Pardes

One of the most striking references to Elisha is found in a legendary baraita about four rabbis of the Mishnaic period (first century CE) who visited the Orchard (that is, pardes or paradise) (Hebrew: פרדס orchard):

Four men entered the pardes — Ben Azzai, Ben Zoma, Acher, and Akiba. Ben Azzai looked and died; Ben Zoma looked and went mad; Acher destroyed the plants; Akiba entered in peace and departed in peace.

The Tosafot, medieval commentaries on the Talmud, say that the four sages "did not go up literally, but it appeared to them as if they went up." Ginzberg, on the other hand, writes that the journey to paradise "is to be taken literally and not allegorically"; "in a moment of ecstasy beheld the interior of heaven", but "he destroyed the plants of the heavenly garden".

The Talmud gives two different interpretations of this last phrase. The Babylonian Talmud says:

What is the meaning of "Acher destroyed the plants"? Of him scripture says: "Do not let your mouth make your flesh sin". What does this mean? Acher saw that Metatron happened to be granted authority to sit while he record the merits of Israel, and he said: "We have been taught that in heaven there is no sitting.... Perhaps there are — God forbid! — two supreme powers". They brought him to Metatron and they smote him with sixty bands of fire. They said to Metatron: "When you saw him, why did you not stand up before him?" Then authority was granted Metatron to erase the merits of Acher. Then a heavenly voice was heard: "'Repent, O backsliding children!' except for Acher."

Ginzberg comments that "the reference here to Metatron — a specifically Babylonian idea, which would probably be unknown to Palestinian rabbis even five hundred years after Elisha — robs the passage of all historical worth". Instead, he highlights the contrast between the accounts in the Babylonian Talmud and the Jerusalem Talmud, noting that the Jerusalem Talmud "makes no mention of Elisha's dualism; but it relates that in the critical period following the rebellion of Bar Kokba, Elisha visited the schools and attempted to entice the students from the study of the Torah, in order to direct their energies to some more practical occupation; and it is to him, therefore, that the verse 'Suffer not thy mouth to cause thy flesh to sin' is to be applied. In connection with this the Biblical quotation is quite intelligible, as according to another haggadah (Shabbat 32b; Ecclesiastes Rabbah 5:5) "flesh" here means children — spiritual children, pupils — whom Elisha killed with his mouth by luring them from the study of the Torah."

Others disagree with Ginzberg, suggesting that he failed to account for the regular travel of sages between Judea and Babylonia to collect and transmit scholarly teachings. Furthermore, scholar Hugh Odeberg has dated portions of the pseudepigraphal Third Book of Enoch, which discusses Metatron, to the first or second century CE, before the redaction of both the Jerusalem and the Babylonian Talmuds, and other scholars have found the concept of Metatron in texts older than 70 CE.