or the reader entered the academy. Simeon issued an order that the assembly should rise as a body only on his own entrance, while on the entrance of the judge only the first row, and on that of the reader only the second row, should rise. Meir and Nathan (the judge) felt offended at this new arrangement and determined to show Simeon's unfitness for his office by puzzling him with difficult halakic questions which he would be unable to answer. Informed of this, Simeon expelled them from the Sanhedrin, but he could not prevent them from writing difficult questions and distributing them among its members. Compelled to readmit both Nathan and Meir, he contrived that their names should not be recorded in the ordinances enacted by him. Nathan submitted, but Meir continued to embarrass the patriarch by addressing to him difficult questions. When, at last, the patriarch threatened excommunication, he answered, "I do not care for your sentence unless you can prove to me on whom, on what grounds, and under what conditions excommunication may be imposed," and left the Sanhedrin. Name "Meir" may have been a sobriquet. The Babylonian Talmud asserts that his actual name was not Meir but Nehorai, and that the real name of Nehorai was not Nehorai but rather Nehemiah or Eleazar ben Arach. This passage is ambiguous regarding whether Meir was renamed twice (from Nehorai and previously from another name), or whether two rabbis (Meir and Nehorai) were each renamed. According to Yeshayah Berlin, Meir and Nehorai were separate rabbis. This reading is supported by several of the oldest Talmud manuscripts. In contrast, modern scholar John McGinley assumes that Meir was renamed twice. To explain the renaming, McGinley notes that Eleazar ben Arach is elsewhere is described as being the greatest of the Sages, and a student of Yohanan ben Zakkai who (at an early age) had mastered the meaning of the mystical revelations which are associated with "the Work of the Chariot." McGinley suggests that the virtual disappearance of Eleazer Ben Arach from rabbinic ways allowed the usage of this name as a cognomen for Meir, acceptably to rabbinic officialdom who permitted this cover name to honor him but with sufficient indirectness so as not also to honor his checkered history with Rabbinic officialdom. The book also says that Yochanan Ben Zakai set up a bet midrash at Bror Hayil after he left Yavneh.