b. Hagigah 14b: The Pardes Account and the "Water, Water" Warning
Talmud Bavli, Chagigah 14b
תלמוד בבלי, חגיגה יד ע"ב
This is the Targum-translated form of the pardes baraita of b. Hagigah 14b — the locus classicus of the merkavah optical-illusion danger and the Talmudic kernel that the Hekhalot palace-ascent literature elaborates into the full sixth-palace water test. It was drafted by the Hekhal Targum engine on 2026-05-28 using glossary revision heikhalot-merkavah-v0.2 with the merkavah-ascent frame controller. The status is verified (editor sign-off 2026-05-28) — the first output in the Targum catalog cleared through full editor sign-off: drift clean, registry clean, the load-bearing Scholem citation scan-verified verbatim and the remaining scholarship citations signed off as accurate canonical positions (see the Audit Trail tab for the per-citation basis), and the public-domain comparand (Rodkinson) indexed.
The source of record is the public-domain Vilna Romm text. A public-domain English predecessor exists for the baraita — Rodkinson (New Edition, c. 1916) — but, notably, Rodkinson omits Rabbi Akiva’s marble / “water, water” warning entirely, so even the PD predecessor does not render the core of this passage (see the Comparison tab). The Targum value-add here is the controlled-vocabulary discipline, the preserved doubled cry, the preserved marble-as-water ambiguity, and the apparatus situating the Talmudic kernel against its fuller Hekhalot throne-vision elaboration and the Scholem-Halperin debate. A genuine first-public-domain-English of the Hekhalot elaboration (Schäfer §§258-259 / §§407-410) remains a future contribution.
The Rabbis taught: Four entered the orchard, and these are they: Ben Azzai and Ben Zoma, Aher, and Rabbi Akiva. Rabbi Akiva said to them: When you reach the stones of pure marble, do not say “water, water,” because it is said (Psalms 101:7), “One who speaks falsehoods shall not be established before my eyes.”
Ben Azzai gazed and died. Of him Scripture says (Psalms 116:15), “Precious in the eyes of the LORD is the death of his devoted ones.” Ben Zoma gazed and was stricken. Of him Scripture says (Proverbs 25:16), “Have you found honey? Eat only your fill, lest you be sated with it and vomit it.” Aher cut down the shoots. Rabbi Akiva departed in peace.
The translation above was produced by the Targum engine against the heikhalot-merkavah corpus’s controlled glossary. The active interpretive frame is merkavah-ascent, in its visionary-ascent and angelic-seal-passage modes. The four-who-entered-the-pardes baraita is the Talmudic seed of the seven-heikhalot drama: the sixth-palace water test, the gate-guardians who destroy the unworthy descender, and the discipline of the gaze.
The terms surfaced as range cards in this chunk are: pardes (rendered as orchard), even-shel-shayish-tahor (rendered as stones of pure marble), and mayim (rendered as water, with the doubled cry “water, water” preserved verbatim). For each, the apparatus carries the active sense set and the rationale for the selected rendering.
Audit trail: model claude-opus-4-8[session], glossary revision heikhalot-merkavah-v0.2, frame controllers version v1.0, drafted at 2026-05-28T21:50:11Z, prompt hash sha256:cd5b54a3696f8e9d. The registry check on this rendering ran clean — every lexicon reference resolves to an extant Hekhal lexicon page, the proof that the merkavah-corpus lexicon gap is closed.