The Soul’s Holding Pattern
1Then I went to another place, and he showed me on the west side a great and high mountain of hard rock 2and inside it four beautiful corners; it had [in it] a deep, wide, and smooth (thing) which was rolling over; and it (the place) was deep and dark to look at.
3At that moment, Rufael, one of the holy angels, who was with me, responded to me; and…
Among the mysteries revealed to Enoch was the fate of souls after death. In older Israelite traditions, whether a person was good or bad in life, their soul existed after death as a wraith or ghost in a shadowy underworld known as Sheol—the equivalent of the Greek Hades. In the postbiblical book of 1 Enoch, the souls of the good and bad are separated: the wicked suffer punishment while the righteous experience joy, anticipating their fate on the day of judgment. This inaugurates a long tradition of describing “tours of heaven and hell,” which reaches its climax in Dante’s Inferno and Paradiso.
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b. Mo‘ed Katan 28a