1. Lapin's imaginative insight and mature judgment are well exemplified in his brief discussion of the ever popular Honi ha-Ma'agel (pp. 6–7, n. 15), whose charismatic rain-making caused such discomfort to his contemporaries. At least they did not make the mistake committed by most modern historians of denying his rain-making. As it happens, Josephus independently attests to the rain-making of a certain Onias in the first century B.C.E., but if Honi was not successful in bringing down the rain, what is the point of his story and what its “historical kernel”? This discussion reveals the hand of a truly gifted phenomenologist of religion, an approach more honored than emulated.