Simon ben Shetach

Origins and early life

Simon ben Shetach was a Pharisee sage of Hasmonean Judaea, active in the first century before the common era, brother of Queen Salome Alexandra and, under her reign, head of the Sanhedrin as Nasi.

Work and career

He lived through the persecution of the Pharisees by Alexander Jannaeus, when he is said to have hidden for years, and through the restoration of Pharisaic authority when his sister came to the throne in 76 before the common era. The rabbinic tradition credits him with three lasting reforms. He instituted schooling for boys in every town, an obligation to establish elementary schools that the Talmud remembers as the foundation of universal Jewish education, so that a father's failure to teach his son would no longer leave the child without learning.

He rewrote the marriage contract, the ketubah, so that a wife's settlement became a lien on the whole of her husband's property rather than a deposit he could dissipate, which made divorce costly and protected women, a reform the Talmud says was made because men divorced their wives too easily. He reformed the law of witnesses, requiring rigorous cross-examination and refusing convictions on circumstantial inference, and a famous story has him refuse to convict a suspected murderer he had himself seen fleeing, because he had not seen the act.

The Talmud also tells of him returning a jewel found on a donkey he had bought, saying he had bought a donkey and not a jewel, so that the seller blessed the God of Simon ben Shetach.