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Shimon ben Shetach Hanged Eighty Women in Ashkelon in One Day

The sages remembered the day Shimon ben Shetach broke the rules of capital procedure in Ashkelon, and why they kept the memory alive instead of burying it.

Curated by Arthur · Told by Maggid ·
Table of Contents
  1. Ashkelon Became a Broken Hour
  2. Two Men Died on the Same Day in the Same City
  3. The Memory Was Not Buried With the Case
  4. The Line Between Emergency and Habit

Rabbi Eliezer asked the question nobody in the court wanted to answer: did Shimon ben Shetach not hang women in Ashkelon?

The answer, preserved in Sifrei Devarim 221:2, the tannaitic midrash on Deuteronomy shaped in the early centuries of the Common Era, is yes. He hanged eighty women in one day. That should have been procedurally impossible. Capital cases were not supposed to be stacked together. The ordinary rules that protected defendants in capital proceedings, the slow process of investigation and testimony and deliberation designed to make execution rare, were compressed or bypassed entirely. The sages offer one sentence from Psalms (119:126): it was a time to act for God, because Torah was being violated.

That sentence carries the full weight of the case. Emergency measure. Exceptional circumstances. One verse that unlocks every other safeguard.

Ashkelon Became a Broken Hour

The rabbinic term kishuf, sorcery, is treated in these texts not as superstition but as a covenantal violation, a practice that draws human attention away from God and toward hidden manipulation of forces that belong to God alone. Ashkelon, in this account, had become a place where that practice was public enough and organized enough that ordinary judicial process could not address it without delay becoming consent.

The tradition does not tell us exactly what the women were doing. It tells us what Shimon ben Shetach decided and what verse he used to justify it. The text preserves the exception in enough detail that future judges would know what kind of crisis warranted it. Without the record, later authorities could use the precedent without understanding its limits. With the record, they can see that even this extreme measure was tied to a specific covenantal emergency and a specific scriptural justification.

Two Men Died on the Same Day in the Same City

The second Ashkelon tradition from Simeon ben Shetach, the Publican, and the Witches of Ashkelon involves a great sage and a corrupt tax collector who died on the same day in the same city. Their funeral processions met in a narrow street. Enemies attacked the mourners of the sage and scattered the crowd. One loyal disciple stayed by his master's body. When people returned to complete the burial in the resulting confusion, they buried the tax collector in the sage's tomb with full honors. The sage's body was thrown into the common grave.

The community was disturbed by this reversal. A righteous man buried without honor, a sinner buried in state, in the city that had already seen one extreme act of justice. The story asks what human communities owe to the dead and what the dead owe to human communities in the logic of divine accounting. The tradition does not resolve the injustice in this world. It defers the resolution to the world where it can be properly addressed.

The Memory Was Not Buried With the Case

What makes the Ashkelon material unusual is not the extremity of the action but the fact that the sages kept it in the canon at all. They could have let it fade. Legal exceptions, once exploited, become precedents for further exceptions. The way to contain that danger is silence.

They chose memory instead. They preserved Rabbi Eliezer's question because the question itself is the check on future misuse. By keeping the story of what Shimon ben Shetach did, they made it necessary for any future judge who wanted to use the same justification to engage with the specific facts of Ashkelon, to explain why their situation resembled it closely enough to invoke it. The memory of the exception is the protection against its casual reuse.

The Line Between Emergency and Habit

Jewish law has always recognized that there are moments when the normal operation of the law must be suspended for the law to survive. But those moments are precisely described and surrounded with constraints because the same reasoning that justifies an emergency measure can justify any measure if the constraint of genuine emergency is removed. Shimon ben Shetach's case remains in the tradition as a memorial of the line between exception and habit, between a broken hour and a broken system.

The city of Ashkelon appears elsewhere in rabbinic memory as a complicated place, neither fully Jewish nor fully pagan in its social geography, a location where Hellenistic culture and Jewish practice overlapped in ways that created ongoing anxieties about where Jewish communal boundaries lay. Placing the kishuf incident there rather than in a more clearly Jewish city gives the story its particular edge. The problem was not simply that women were practicing sorcery. It was that the covenantal community was permeable enough in that place that the practice had become organized and public. That permeability is what the emergency measure addressed.

AshkelonWitchesShimon Ben ShetachJudgmentLawDivine Justice
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From the tradition

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The texts this telling draws on, in full. Open a card to read inline, or expand it for a wider, quieter read.

Sifrei Devarim 221:2Sifrei Devarim

Rabbi Eliezer asked the question nobody in the court could ignore: did Shimon ben Shetach not hang women in Ashkelon?

The answer, preserved in Sifrei Devarim 221:2, is yes. He hanged eighty women in one day. That should have been impossible under ordinary procedure. Capital cases were not supposed to be stacked together, and hanging was not the normal penalty being discussed. The sages answer with one sentence from (Psalms 119:126): it was a time to act for God, because Torah was being violated.

This is the frightening category later called hora'at sha'ah, an emergency ruling for a broken hour. The story is not permission for judges to love exceptions. It is a warning that exceptions can become necessary only when delay itself becomes betrayal. Shimon ben Shetach is remembered because the act was severe, public, and impossible to treat as routine.

The passage leaves the discomfort in place. It forces the reader to hold two truths at once: Jewish law guards procedure because human power is dangerous, and Jewish law also remembers rare moments when a leader believed the hour would collapse without immediate judgment. That tension is why Ashkelon stayed in the rabbinic memory.

Full source
Sanhedrin 45b (Harris, Hebraic Literature, 1901)Hebraic Literature (1901)

Two men died on the same day in the same city. One was a great and righteous sage. The other was a tax collector, a known sinner. Both funeral processions met in the same narrow street, and while the town was honoring the sage's bier, enemies attacked and scattered the crowds. One loyal disciple stayed beside his master's body. When the townspeople returned to finish the burial, in the confusion they took the wrong bier and laid the publican in the sage's tomb with full honors. The sage, meanwhile, was buried disgracefully in the tax collector's plot.

The disciple was broken. For what sin did my teacher deserve this, he asked, and for what merit did a sinner get the funeral of a righteous person? His Rabbi came to him in a dream. Take comfort, he said. Come, I will show you my honored place in paradise, and also show you the man in Gehenna, the door of which even now creaks in his ears. I once listened to contemptuous talk against the Rabbis and did not rebuke it. For that I was buried without honor. The publican once prepared a banquet for the Roman governor, who did not come, and the food was given to the poor. For that act of unintended charity, he received the honor meant for me.

The disciple pressed further. And how long will the publican burn? The Rabbi answered, Until Simeon ben Shetach dies. Simeon knows that several witches practice their dark trade in Ashkelon, and he idly allows it. When he dies, he will take the publican's place in Gehenna until the witches are removed.

In the morning the disciple hurried to Simeon and reported the dream. Simeon acted at once. He assembled eighty strong young men, chose a rainy day, and marched on Ashkelon. This vivid passage from Sanhedrin 45b, preserved in Harris's 1901 Hebraic Literature, teaches that silence in the face of evil is itself an offense, and that a great man pays for every act he could have stopped and did not.

Full source
Sanhedrin 44b-45bHebraic Literature (1901)

Simeon ben Shetach, president of the Sanhedrin in the first century BCE, had a problem in Ashkelon: eighty witches living together in a cave, working malevolent magic that terrorized the region. The law of (Exodus 22:17) was clear, "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live". But no one had been able to arrest them.

Witches, in the old tradition, were powerless once lifted off the ground. Simeon built his operation around that single weakness.

The Trap of Dry Clothes on a Wet Day

On a rainy day he assembled eighty young men. Each was given an extra garment, folded carefully and stowed away inside an earthen vessel so it would stay bone-dry. At a given signal, each man was to seize one witch and lift her off the earth.

Simeon left his men in ambush and walked into the witches' den alone. They eyed him with suspicion. "Who are you?" He answered, "I am a wizard, and I have come to test my magic against yours."

They laughed. "What trick have you to show?"

He said, "Though the day is soaked with rain, I can produce eighty young men all in perfectly dry clothes."

They smirked: "Prove it."

He walked to the door and gave the signal. Eighty young men emerged from their hiding places, pulled the dry cloaks out of the earthen jars, slipped them on, and rushed into the cave. Each grabbed a witch, hoisted her off the floor. And her power drained out the soles of her feet.

The eighty were brought before the court, convicted by due process, and executed. The passage in Sanhedrin 44b-45b preserves this as a rare story of pre-Hasmonean legal courage: the leader of the Sanhedrin risking himself to enforce a law no one else could.

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