The venerable Hillel had eighty disciples. That number is not a boast but a ledger. The rabbis kept careful count.
Thirty of those eighty, they said, were worthy that the Shekhinah, the Divine Presence, should rest upon them the way it rested upon Moses. That was the top tier, the prophets in potential. Another thirty were worthy that the sun should stand still for them in battle the way it stood still for Joshua son of Nun at Gibeon (Joshua 10:13). These were the miracle-workers, men around whom nature paused. The remaining twenty stood in the middle, neither prophets nor sun-stoppers, but solid, serious scholars.
The greatest of the eighty was Jonathan ben Uzziel, whose Aramaic Targum of the Prophets is still studied. The least of them, the rabbis admit almost casually, was Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai, the man who would later smuggle himself out of besieged Jerusalem in a coffin, meet the Roman general Vespasian, and ask for the town of Yavneh. It was his academy at Yavneh that saved the Torah when the Temple fell in 70 CE. The least of Hillel's disciples became the founder of Judaism as we know it.
And what did the least of Hillel's disciples actually know? The rabbis made a list. He left nothing unstudied: the Written Torah, the Mishnah, the Gemara, the constitutions, the legends, the minutiae of law, the finer points of the scribes, the arguments kal va-chomer and analogy, the astronomical calculation of the new moon, gematria, the parables of unripe grapes, and more.
This teaching preserved in Hebraic Literature (1901) carries a quiet warning: the one they called least knew everything. Measure your teachers carefully.