Rabban Shimon ben Hillel רַבָּן שִׁמְעוֹן בֶּן הִלֵּל

The one tannaitic text. Shabbat 15a: "Hillel and Shimon, Gamliel and Shimon held their patriarchate before the Temple for a hundred years." The four are Hillel, his son Shimon, his grandson Gamliel and his great-grandson Shimon. Note what this is: a chronological aside inside a dispute about the impurity of glassware, where the baraita is establishing that Yose ben Yoezer and Yose ben Yochanan lived long before Hillel. His name is not even given in full—merely "and Shimon," fourth in a list.

In Maimonides he appears twice, both times purely genealogically: "Rabban Yochanan ben Zakkai and Rabban Shimon the son of Hillel received from Hillel and his court," and "Rabban Gamliel the Elder received from Rabban Shimon his father, the son of Hillel." Then as link יא of the forty. Maimonides attributes no teaching to him whatsoever.

The silence of the sources is the substance here. Not one halakhah is recorded in his name in the Mishnah, the Tosefta, either Talmud or the halakhic midrashim. No aggadah, no narrative, no dictum, no dispute, no named disciple. Pirkei Avot omits him entirely: 1:12–15 are Hillel and Shammai, and 1:16 goes straight to "Rabban Gamliel," with the "received from" formula already abandoned. The tractate whose entire purpose is the chain of transmission skips the man Maimonides counts as link 30. The Maharal, in Derekh Chayim, offers four separate explanations of the omission—and that four are needed is itself a datum. Josephus, who knows the house of Hillel and names Simon son of Gamaliel, never mentions him.

The reference works have nothing either. There is no separate article on him in the 1906 Jewish Encyclopedia or in the Encyclopaedia Judaica; the JE article on Hillel says nothing about the son and does not even quote Shabbat 15a. English Wikipedia manages "Little is known about him." Worth saying, because a reader who goes to check will find the same nothing.

No source gives his years—not a year, not an age, not a length of office. There is only arithmetic from Shabbat 15a: a hundred years of four patriarchates down to the destruction (3830 AM) put Hillel's accession around 3730; if Hillel led for forty years, Shimon begins around 3770, and his son Gamliel the Elder is already the dominant figure in the 3790s. Sefer ha-Yuchasin gives him twelve years, other late lists twenty; both are medieval reckonings, not tannaitic data. Hence the database gives him a window of activity and no years of life: inventing them is not permitted.

Two live questions. First: was he the first to bear the title Rabban, or does it begin only with Rabban Gamliel the Elder?—genuinely disputed in the Hebrew literature. Second concerns us not at all but comes up first in any search: Christian scholars have repeatedly proposed identifying him with the Simeon of Luke 2:25–35. There is no Jewish source for this and nothing behind it but a coincidence of name and period.

Who he is confused with. Three Shimons in four generations of one house: himself, his grandson Rabban Shimon ben Gamliel the Elder (d. c. 3830) and Rabban Shimon ben Gamliel of Usha, father of Rabbi Yehudah ha-Nasi. And Avot 1:17 ("Shimon his son says") is assigned to him—but "his son" there is the son of the Rabban Gamliel of 1:16, that is, of Gamliel the Elder; so it is his grandson, not him.