Two Conversion Tales the Exempla Brought Forward From the Talmud

The Exempla of the Rabbis, Moses Gaster's 1924 anthology, preserves two famous tales of conversion. The would-be proselyte who wanted to become high priest, and how Hillel received him while Shammai rebuffed him. The robber Resh Lakish who became one of the great Amoraim after a single encounter with R. Johanan.

Both stories are foundational in the Babylonian Talmud. The Exempla preserves them in compressed form for medieval Jewish readers who needed the tales available outside the full Talmudic context.

The Would-Be High Priest

Exempla 31 recounts the famous Hillel-Shammai conversion exchange. A heathen heard about the honor paid to the Israelite high priest and decided he wanted to become a Jew specifically in order to occupy that role.

Shammai refused him outright. The request was absurd. Only a born Israelite of the priestly line could become high priest. The would-be proselyte's premise was wrong.

Hillel received him on a different basis. He accepted the man's interest and set the condition that the man first learn all that was required. The man studied the Law. In his studies he found the verse, the stranger who approaches the sanctuary shall die. He was informed that even David, the king of Israel, would not have been permitted to approach the altar. The man, learning this from the inside rather than being rebuffed from the outside, accepted the limitation and converted in earnest.

The exemplum preserves the genealogical postscript. The man had two children. He named one Hillel and the other Gamliel. They were known as the proselytes of Hillel. The father, in the rabbinic tradition Gaster preserves, was Onkelos the proselyte, whose Aramaic translation of the Torah became one of the most influential rabbinic texts of the early common era.

The teaching is structural. Shammai's refusal would have produced no convert. Hillel's conditional acceptance produced the founder of a translation tradition that would shape Jewish liturgy across many centuries.

The Robber Who Became Resh Lakish

Exempla 224 records the famous conversion of Resh Lakish. R. Johanan, the exemplum notes, was one of the last beautiful men of Jerusalem. Resh Lakish, a robber, surprised R. Johanan in the bath, mistaking him for a woman.

The encounter changed Resh Lakish's life. R. Johanan converted him to Torah study on the promise that he could marry R. Johanan's sister. Resh Lakish accepted. He became, over years of study, one of the greatest scholars of his generation, R. Johanan's primary intellectual partner and sparring opponent.

The exemplum preserves the tragic ending. The two men were arguing one day about a legal point. R. Johanan, in a flash of anger, said something cutting about Resh Lakish's robber past. Resh Lakish was wounded and fell ill. He died of the wound. R. Johanan grieved over the death for the rest of his own life, never recovering from the loss of the only opponent who had ever truly sharpened his thought.

The teaching is severe. The same R. Johanan whose conversion of Resh Lakish had given the rabbinic tradition one of its greatest pairs eventually destroyed the partnership with a single careless reference to the partner's past. The exemplum preserves both the conversion and the destruction because the second is the cost the first had not been prepared to pay.

Why Conversion Was Not Finished Work

The Exempla's editorial decision to pair these two conversions is itself a teaching. Conversion is not a single act. It is the beginning of a relationship that the converter has to maintain for the rest of the converter's life. Hillel's patient instruction laid the foundation that produced Onkelos. R. Johanan's patient instruction laid a foundation that he later destroyed with one careless reference. Both reception and maintenance are required.

What the Two Tales Together Teach

Read the two passages together and the editorial design of Gaster's Exempla becomes legible. The collection preserves both Hillel's patient conversion of Onkelos and R. Johanan's eventually-ruinous conversion of Resh Lakish because both stories teach the cost of receiving outsiders into the tradition.

The receiving is the work. The maintenance afterward is also the work. Hillel did the receiving with patience and saw Onkelos become a permanent gift to Jewish letters. R. Johanan did the receiving with patience and then, decades later, broke the partnership with a single sentence. The Exempla preserves both because medieval Jewish readers needed reminders that neither receiving nor maintaining converts is finished work in the moment of the conversion itself.