Eleazar ben Azariah

Eleazar ben Azariah (Hebrew: אלעזר בן עזריה) was a 1st-century CE Jewish tanna, i.e. Mishnaic sage.

When Gamaliel II was temporarily deposed from the patriarchate due to his provoking demeanor, Eleazar, though still very young, was elevated to that office by the deliberate choice of his colleagues.

[8] On a visit to the aged Dosa b. Harkinas the latter joyfully exclaimed, "In him I see the fulfillment of the Scriptural saying:[9] 'I have been young, and now am old; yet have I not seen the righteous forsaken, nor his seed begging bread'",[10] The latter was amassed by dealing in wine, oil,[11] and cattle.

While he lived he enjoyed the glowing praise of his famous colleagues, who said, "That generation in which Eleazar b. Azariah flourishes can not be termed orphan".

Rabbinic homiletics owes to Eleazar the introduction of the rule called semuchin (סמוכין = "contiguous"), by which one Scriptural passage is explained or supplemented by another immediately preceding or succeeding it.

Zahavy concludes that, "What we know of Eleazar thus is limited to the data that a few editors chose to preserve for the direct needs of their compilations.

"[31] However, see Eleazar ben Azariah's far-reaching comments preserved for later generations at B.T., Hagigah 3b, which explicitly present an underlying rationale and agenda for the entirety of the Oral Torah discussions of the Talmudic and later Sages.

He says there that those that argue that something is impure and those that say it is pure, those who prohibit something and those who permit it, those who disqualify and those who declare (the same thing) fit, all are right in their way, "as is written, 'And God spoke all these words.'"