Honi ha-Me'agel

Origins and early life

Honi ha-Me'agel, 'Honi the Circle-Drawer', was a Jewish holy man of Judea in the first century BCE, in the last generation of the Hasmonean kingdom, and one of the rare figures of rabbinic legend whose existence and death are confirmed by a source outside the rabbinic tradition; this fiche says plainly which is which.

Work and career

The Mishnah tells his story in the tractate on fasts: in a year of drought the people asked him to pray for rain, and when none fell he drew a circle on the ground, stood inside it and swore by God's great name that he would not leave until rain came; a drizzle fell, and he asked for more, then a deluge, and he asked for rain of blessing, and it came in the measure he named — after which Simeon ben Shetah, the head of the sages, sent him word that he deserved excommunication for his familiarity with heaven, but that one does not punish a child who wheedles his father.

The Talmud added the tale of his seventy years' sleep under a carob tree, planted for grandchildren he would not see. Josephus, who calls him Onias, records the end: in 65 BCE, when the brothers Hyrcanus and Aristobulus fought for the Hasmonean crown and Hyrcanus, with an Arab army, besieged his brother in the Temple, the besiegers seized the righteous man and demanded that he curse Aristobulus; he prayed instead that God grant neither side its wish against the other, and the crowd stoned him to death.

The rain-making is a story; the refusal, and the stoning, are history. He is the model of the hasid, the man whose intimacy with God serves the people, and his circle is drawn in Jewish memory to this day.