אבטליון

Avtalyon — known in English sources as Abtalion — was the av beit din of the closing generation of the zugot, paired with Shmaya, who held the nesiut; the pair who came after them, Hillel and Shammai, sealed the era of the zugot altogether. The two were themselves gerim, or else the sons of gerim, and the Bavli brings that they descended from Sancheriv, king of Ashur. Avtalyon learned before Yehuda ben Tabbai and Shimon ben Shetach, and spent time in Alexandria in Egypt, where his rebbe Yehuda had taken refuge when Alexander Yannai persecuted the chachamim. His words in Pirkei Avot carry the mark of those years: chachamim, be careful with your words, lest you incur exile to a place of foul waters, and the talmidim who come after you drink of them and be lost, and the Name of Heaven be desecrated through it.

Avtalyon and Shmaya were the first chachamim to be called darshanim, and the first whose halachic rulings came down to the later generations. In the machloket of the zugot over semichah on Yom Tov, Avtalyon held that one does not lean. The other halachot brought in his name are brought jointly with Shmaya — among them that the korban chagigah is not offered on Shabbat, a ruling Yehuda ben Dortai rejected so sharply that he withdrew with his son to the south, wondering aloud at two such great chachamim of the generation. Two weavers from the Dung Gate of Yerushalayim testified in their name that three lugin of drawn water render a mikveh unfit.

Hillel was their talmid. Entry to the beit midrash was not open to all: those who sought it paid a small fee each day. On one Motzaei Yom Kippur the people were escorting the Kohen Gadol home from the Beit HaMikdash when Shmaya and Avtalyon came into view, and the crowd left the Kohen Gadol and went after them; in the end the two joined the people in going to greet him.

Their kevarim are shown at Gush Halav (Jish) in the Galil. Rabbi Shmuel b’Rabbi Shimshon, who toured Eretz Yisrael around 1210, describes the graves of Shmaya and Avtalyon there in his travel account, and travelers of the Middle Ages after him — Menachem HaChevroni, Yaakov HaShaliach, a talmid of the Ramban, and Ishtori HaParchi — describe them as well. The site stands near the entrance to the village: a small structure holding a double sarcophagus.