person · P0502 · zugot
Yonatan ben Uzziel יונתן בן עוזיאל
The greatest of Hillel's eighty students — the baraita ranks the whole cohort and sets him at its head, above even Rabban Yochanan ben Zakkai, who was its "smallest." Tradition remembers his Torah as combustible: a bird flying over him as he learned would burn. His name rides on the Targum of the Prophets (Targum Yonatan ben Uzziel), whose publication, the Bavli says, shook Eretz Yisrael.
Who
- Hebrew
- יונתן בן עוזיאל
- Era
- zugot
- Received the mesorah from
- Hillel
- Teachers
- Hillel
When
- Traditional
- greatest of Hillel's eighty students — fl. c. 3720–3768 AM
- Civil (computed)
- 3720–3768 AM · 41 BCE – 8 CE
- Academic
- 1st c. BCE – early 1st c. CE on the traditional placement; the Targum bearing his name reached final form centuries later
- Lifespan (traditional)
- ≈48 years
- Precision
- approximate
How do we know
| Claim | Evidence | Confidence | Sources |
|---|---|---|---|
| "Eighty students had Hillel the Elder: thirty of them fit for the Shechinah to rest upon them like Moshe Rabbenu, thirty fit for the sun to stand still for them like Yehoshua bin Nun, twenty in between. The greatest of them all — Yonatan ben Uzziel; the smallest of them all — Rabban Yochanan ben Zakkai." The baraita, taught in both passages, is the attested reception from Hillel (Hillel) drawn as this entry's edge; both add that when he sat and engaged in Torah, any bird that flew over him was burned.
Both passages verified verbatim (גדול שבכולן — יונתן בן עוזיאל). The kal-vachomer there — if the smallest of them mastered all that, how much more the greatest — is the baraita's own measure of him.
|
rabbinic | ★★★★★ | |
| "The Targum of the Prophets — Yonatan ben Uzziel said it from the mouths of Chaggai, Zechariah, and Malachi, and Eretz Yisrael quaked four hundred parsah by four hundred parsah." A bat kol demanded who had revealed the secrets; he stood and answered that he had done it for Heaven's honor alone, "so that machloket not multiply in Israel" — and when he sought to translate the Ketuvim too, he was stopped: "because the end of mashiach is in it." The Targum (Targum Yonatan ben Uzziel) carries his authorship edge on this tradition.
Passage verified verbatim. The authorship edge records the Bavli's attribution; the received text's Babylonian final form is the next claim.
|
rabbinic | ★★★★☆ | |
| His placement here is anchored solely to Hillel's generation — no source dates him independently — and academic scholarship reads the received Targum Yonatan as an Eretz Yisrael core of the 1st–2nd century CE fixed in the Babylonian academies, as Targum Yonatan ben Uzziel's own claims record. The man belongs to the zugot; the book that bears his name kept growing after him.
Schematic generational placement on the atlas's convention for attested students of a dated master.
|
reconstruction | ★★☆☆☆ |
|