Choni HaMe'agel
110 BCE–60 BCE · Tannaim · Jerusalem
Choni HaMe'agel (Honi the Circle-Drawer, c. 1st century BCE) was a Second-Temple-era charismatic miracle-worker whose dramatic rain-prayer episode is preserved in the Mishnah (Ta'anit 3:8) and Bavli (Ta'anit 23a). In response to a prolonged drought he drew a circle on the ground, stood inside it, and refused to leave until God sent rain — a kind of holy chutzpah that Shimon ben Shetach called borderline blasphemy yet acknowledged was effective. Another famous Talmudic story has him sleep for 70 years (the Bavli's 'Rip Van Winkle' narrative) and awake to a generation that did not know him. Josephus calls him Onias the Righteous and reports his murder by the Hasmonean factions during their 65 BCE civil war.
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JerusalemירושליםJudea
What they did here
Active in late-Hasmonean Judea; murdered during the 65 BCE Hasmonean civil war according to Josephus.
Jerusalem in this era
Jerusalem during the Tannaitic era was a city of shattering transformation. Under Roman imperial rule, the Second Temple stood as the spiritual and administrative heart of Jewish life until its catastrophic destruction in 70 CE—an upheaval that forced the entire apparatus of Jewish learning and authority to relocate northward to Yavneh and beyond. Before that rupture, the city had been home to a thriving scholarly aristocracy; the Temple's priestly classes, the Pharisaic sages, and the sanhedrin conducted their debates within the Temple precincts and in the crowded streets of the Jewish quarter. After 70 CE, Jerusalem became a wounded city under tightened Roman surveillance, its Jewish population diminished but not extinguished, its spiritual center now ghostly ruins. Yet even in diminishment, the memory of Jerusalem's academies—where figures like Rabban Yochanan ben Zakkai had taught Torah before the siege—remained vivid in the consciousness of the dispersed rabbinical movement. The city's tragic centrality transformed it from a living seat of power into the symbolic heart of Jewish mourning and messianic hope, a reality that would define Jewish consciousness for centuries to come.
About Jerusalem
Jerusalem, in the Judean hills, is a sacred city for Jews, Christians and Muslims. In the Hebrew Bible it is King David's capital and the site of Solomon's Temple; the First Temple was destroyed by Babylon in 586 BCE and the Second Temple, rebuilt from about 516 BCE, by Rome in 70 CE. Christians revere it as the place of Jesus's crucifixion and, in their faith, his resurrection; in Islamic tradition it is the destination of the Prophet Muhammad's Night Journey and the first direction of prayer, marked by the Dome of the Rock (691-92) and al-Aqsa Mosque. It was ruled in turn by Rome and Byzantium, by Muslim dynasties from 638, by Crusaders (1099-1187), Ayyubids, Mamluks and Ottomans (1517-1917), and by Britain. Divided between Israel and Jordan from 1948 to 1967, it has since been under Israeli control. Israel regards the city as its capital; Palestinians claim East Jerusalem as the capital of a future state; most countries do not recognize sovereignty over the whole city.
In Jerusalem at the same time
Yehoshua ben Perachya, Shimon ben Shetach, Yehuda ben Tabbai, Hillel HaZaken, Avtalyon, Shemayah
In the same place & time
Sages whose lives overlapped with Choni HaMe'agel’s in the same cities, drawn from their recorded journeys.
In the same tradition
Yehoshua ben Perachya, Shimon ben Shetach, Yehuda ben Tabbai, Hillel HaZaken, Avtalyon, Shemayah, Bava ben Buta
The world in their lifetime
Thinkers and teachers of other traditions whose lives overlapped with Choni HaMe'agel’s — a glimpse of the wider world they lived in. Drawn purely from recorded birth and death years.
Works
No works attributed in the corpus yet.