What Counts as an Enchanter According to Akiva

Midrash Aggadah Sanhedrin 65b

Curated by The Jewish Mythology Team · Published January 15, 2025

Sanhedrin 65b sets the sages debating: what exactly is an enchanter — the figure the Torah forbids?

Rabbi Shimon gives the ugliest definition: one who passes the secretions of seven different male creatures over a person's eye. The sages are more careful: an enchanter is a practitioner of optical illusions, a man who deceives the eye into seeing what is not there.

Rabbi Akiva has a subtler target. An enchanter, he says, is the person who tells you the calendar rules your life. "Today is good for a journey. Tomorrow will be lucky for selling. The year before the Sabbatical is when wheat grows best. Pull up peas at this hour and they will not spoil." In other words — the man who sells you hours and days as if fortune were printed on them.

The sages add one more portrait: the augur. The one who panics when his bread falls from his mouth, or his walking stick slips from his hand, or his son calls after him, or a crow caws overhead, or a deer crosses his path, or he spots a snake on the right or a fox on the left. The one who bargains with tax collectors over which day of the month to pay.

What links them? Every "enchanter" in Akiva's catalog has surrendered his agency to a sign. A Jew is meant to ask what is right, not what is lucky. The calendar belongs to God, not to omens.

Themes

Rabbis Ethics Wisdom Sin

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