A rabbinic sage of the second century CE, active in the Galilee in the generation after the Bar Kokhba revolt and named on hundreds of pages of the Mishnah and both Talmuds. The tradition remembers him hiding from Rome in a cave for thirteen years with his son, and his tomb at Meron draws one of the largest annual pilgrimages in Jewish life. From the late thirteenth century he acquires a second existence as the central speaker of the Zohar, which presents itself as the record of his circle walking the land of Israel. Modern scholarship reads that framing as a literary device of the Zohar's own author or authors rather than as an account of the historical tanna, so two very different figures now answer to one name.
Facts
Open Questions
Place of OriginNot established. He is documented studying under Akiva in Judea and later teaching in the Galilee, including at Tekoa, Tiberias and Meron, but no source records the specific place of his birth. 4 Shimon bar Yochai is a second century tanna, one of Akiva's most eminent disciples, associated with Judea during his studies and with Tiberias and Meron in the Galilee later in life. Encyclopaedia Judaica's own account names places where he lived, taught and reportedly hid, but at no point states where he was born. The Zohar's traditional attribution to him is itself now credited by scholarship to Moses de Leon, which illustrates how much of his received biography is legendary accretion rather than documented fact. As with most Tannaitic figures, no birth record survives, and nobody has published a defended position on where specifically he was born. Identity
Also Known As Also Known AsRashbi, the acronym of Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai 1 Disputed
Lifespan or Floruitbirth_date = 90 (Wikipedia infobox, uncited) 3 Wikipedia's infobox states birth_date 90 and death_date "160 (aged 70)" with no citation attached to either figure. The Divinity Atlas's own Open Question 259456 records that rabbinic sources document his teaching, his hiding from Rome and his tomb at Meron, but that no source gives an actual birth or death year, and that the later literary Shimon bar Yochai of the Zohar complicates any single dating further. 90 and 160 are recorded here as the commonly repeated traditional figures, not as settled fact; the open question is left standing. Attestation
HistoricityA second-century tanna named throughout the Mishnah and both Talmuds. The Zohar's portrait of him is a later literary construction and is not evidence about the man. Traditions Revering This Figure Life
Lifespan or FloruitSecond century CE. No birth or death year is recorded. 1 The rabbinic sources give no dates for him. Any year offered is inferred from the generation of teachers he is placed among, and the inference is not itself attested. Place of ActivityThe Galilee, in the generation after the Bar Kokhba revolt 1 Classification
NationalityRoman Empire (Historical) 3 Veneration StatusOfficially Recognized or Venerated 2 Learn More
The Tanna the Talmud Knows
The Shimon bar Yochai of the rabbinic sources is a documented second-century teacher, counted among the students of Rabbi Akiva who survived the persecutions following the Bar Kokhba revolt. He appears constantly in the Mishnah, the Tosefta and both Talmuds, usually in legal argument, and the positions credited to him are sharp, ascetic and unusually willing to reason from the purpose behind a law rather than from its letter.
The most famous story about him is told at Shabbat 33b. Having spoken against Rome, he flees with his son Elazar, and the two hide in a cave for thirteen years sustained by a carob tree and a spring, studying without interruption. When they emerge, the sight of ordinary people working the land is unbearable to them and everything they look at is consumed by fire, so a voice sends them back for a further year. The passage is a rabbinic parable about the cost of undivided study rather than a chronicle, but it fixed his reputation as the sage of withdrawal and hidden knowledge, and it is the seed from which the whole later legend grows.
His grave at Meron in the upper Galilee became a pilgrimage site, and the bonfires and gatherings held there on Lag BaOmer remain among the largest annual assemblies in Jewish life. No birth or death year is recorded for him anywhere in the rabbinic literature, which is interested in his rulings and his sayings and not in his biography. Every date offered for him is inference from the generation of teachers he is placed among.
The Voice the Zohar Gave Him
From the late thirteenth century a second Shimon bar Yochai exists alongside the first. The Zohar, which begins circulating in Castile in the 1280s, is written largely in an artificial Aramaic and presents itself as the record of a circle gathered around the second-century sage as they walk through the Galilee expounding the Torah. He is its central voice, and the authority the book carries in later Judaism rests on that claim.
Gershom Scholem argued that the Zohar was composed in Castile by Moses de Leon, on the evidence of its language, of that Aramaic's dependence on medieval Hebrew idiom, and of the close correspondences between the Zohar and de Leon's signed Hebrew works. That case has been the scholarly default since 1941. Yehuda Liebes accepted the medieval dating but argued that a circle of writers rather than a single hand stands behind the book, which leaves authorship open in a way Scholem's version does not.
Nothing here is settled by asserting one side. The traditional position holds the sage to be the author and the medieval manuscripts to be transmission. The scholarly position holds the ascription to be pseudepigraphic, a device with long precedent in Jewish literature, where a work is placed in the mouth of an earlier authority to say where it belongs rather than to deceive anyone about who held the pen. The atlas records the attribution as disputed and names both camps, because the disagreement is real and is itself a part of the Zohar's history.
Connections
Associated With
Lag BaOmer is linked to Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai, the mystic to whom the Zohar is ascribed, whose traditional yahrzeit falls on this day.
Source Encyclopaedia Judaica, 2nd editionMichael Berenbaum and Fred Skolnik (eds.)
Why this is disputed. The tomb at Meron venerated as Shimon bar Yochai's burial place draws the largest hillula in Israel, on Lag BaOmer, when celebrants light bonfires and mark the upsherin, a boy's first haircut. No source contemporary with his own second century Galilee lifetime names Meron as his grave; the identification is medieval pilgrim tradition. Gershom Scholem traces a parallel pattern in the Zohar, Kabbalah's foundational text, attributed to Shimon bar Yochai himself but understood by scholars to have been composed centuries later in medieval Spain, a case of the same name being retrojected onto a later tradition's own point of origin.
Source Major Trends in Jewish MysticismGershom Scholem
Attributed Works
Why this is disputed. The Zohar presents the second century sage Shimon bar Yochai as its central speaker, teaching esoteric wisdom to his disciples while hiding from Roman persecution, and Kabbalistic tradition took that internal framing as a claim of his own authorship, transmitted secretly for over a millennium before its thirteenth century publication. Modern scholarship, following Gershom Scholem's landmark study, holds this attribution pseudepigraphic, a literary device setting an ancient authoritative voice over a medieval composition rather than a historical record of bar Yochai's own teaching.
Source Studies in the ZoharYehuda Liebes
Belongs to Tradition
Namesake Of
Source The Zaddiq as Axis Mundi in Later JudaismArthur Green
Revered In
Entity-backed identity for the revered-in enum value this member already carries, resolved by exact or single-candidate near-exact live entity name match against a same-atlas religion, denomination or organization entity, per the phase 3 revered-in pilot (docs\design_entity_backed_browse_buckets_20260928.md, owner decision 2026-09-28, w-bucketpilot-reveredin-0929). The revered-in fact itself, with its own citation, remains on the member entity unchanged; this relationship only adds the durable entity identity the enum value already names.
In the Other Atlases
Sources
1. Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism
2. Shimon bar Yochai, Structured Record (Wikidata Q557405)
3. Wikipedia: Shimon bar Yochai
WikipediaNationality, from source article
Shimon bar Yochai or Shimon ben Yochai, also known by the acronym Rashbi, was a 2nd-century tanna or sage of the land of Israel.
Wikipedia infobox religious biography, birth_date/death_date fields
birth_date = 90 ... death_date = 160 (aged 70)
View the Source 4. Encyclopaedia Britannica (online academic reference)
Encyclopaedia Britannica editors, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., 2024View the Source Open Questions (2 open questions)
When was Shimon bar Yochai born, and when did he die?
Rabbinic sources record his teaching, his hiding from Rome, and his tomb at Meron, but no source gives an actual birth or death year, and the later literary Shimon bar Yochai of the Zohar complicates any single dating further.
What would resolve this A datable inscription or external documentary record naming a birth or death year for the historical tanna, independent of the devotional yahrzeit tradition and of the Zohar's own literary framing.
Rabbinics, history of the Mishnaic and Talmudic periodGershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism
Where was Shimon bar Yochai born?
He is documented studying under Akiva in Judea and later teaching in the Galilee, including at Tekoa, Tiberias and Meron, but no source, including Encyclopaedia Judaica's own detailed account, records the specific place of his birth.
What would resolve this A Tannaitic era record naming his birthplace directly, distinct from the places he later studied and taught.
Rabbinic studies; history of the Zohar and Jewish mysticismDivinity Atlas Open Questions Register, First Edition
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