206 A History of Judaism
He prayed, but the rain did not fall. What did he do? He drew a circle and
stood within it and said before God, ‘O Lord of the world, your children
have turned their faces to me, for that I am like a son of the house before
thee. I swear by your great name that I will not stir hence until you have
pity on your children.’The rain came, although achieving the right level of precipitation to
satisfy the public – neither too light nor too violent – required fur-
ther prayer. In due course the rain fell in such abundance that Honi
had to pray for the ‘rain of goodwill, blessing and graciousness’ to go
away.
Private fasting might be expected to bring the individual closer to
God to experience apocalyptic visions (see below), but it could also be
a simple mark of humble piety, as of the beautiful widow Judith who
‘fasted all the days of her widowhood, except ... the festivals and days
of rejoicing of the house of Israel ... No one spoke ill of her, for she
feared God with great devotion.’ This image of Judith’s piety at home is
portrayed in the book in the Apocrypha which bears her name as
entirely private until a national emergency draws her into very public
action, striking off the head of Holofernes, the commander of the Assyr-
ian army, to public praise from the whole community. Such an image is
typical of a number of heroines of Second Temple literature: Esther was
the virtuous woman prepared to infiltrate the Persian court to save her
people, and Susanna, the story of whose failed seduction formed a nov-
ella within the Greek version of the book of Daniel, was a virtuous wife
willing to die rather than succumb.^10
Magic, Demons and Angels
Ezekiel had reported women ‘who sew magic bands upon all wrists and
make veils for the head of persons of every stature, in the hunt for
souls’, and the book of Exodus specifically singles out the sorceress as a
danger (‘you shall not permit a female sorcerer to live’), but post- biblical
Jewish magic was developed (as far as is known) by male practitioners,
and their actions could be treated as pious if carried out in the right
spirit. We have already seen the power of Honi the circle- maker to bring
rain. Early rabbinic sources attributed similar miracles to the pious
Hanina b. Dosa, who is known in the Mishnah as ‘a man of deed’ able
to predict the fate of the ill: