Hoshaiah II

Hoshaiah or Oshaya (Also spelled: Oshaia ; Hebrew : אושעיא, הושעיה ; died ca. 350 CE) was a Jewish amora of the 3rd and 4th amoraic generations.¹ It is supposed that his colleague Hanina was his brother ( Sanh. 14a; see Edels , Ḥiddushe Agadot, ad loc.). They were lineal descendants from Eli the priest , which circumstance they assigned as reason for Johanan 's failure to ordain them. Furthermore, the Talmud refers once to Hoshaiah and Ḥanina as rabbis (with the generic term Rav ) in Sanh. 67b, when dealing with the laws differentiating magic as illusion and as wizardry . Hoshaiah and his colleague stand out as producing magic while studying Sefer Yetzirah , which is there considered neither illusion ( aḥizat eynayim , literally "catching of the eyes") nor sorcery. Hoshaiah and Ḥanina are also mentioned in connection with a certain bath-house, the ownership of which was contested by two persons, one of whom turned over the property as " heḳdesh " (for sacred use), causing Hoshaiah, Ḥanina, and other rabbis to leave it ( B. On the day Hoshaiah died, it is claimed, the largest date-palm in Tiberias was uprooted and fell ( Yer. A different Hoshaiah or Heshaiah is also mentioned in the Book of Jeremiah 42:1 Since the late twentieth century, a Jewish illusionist borrowed this name in being called Oshaya the Seer , obviously inspired by the famous amora and his skills in the magical arts.²