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.