Rabbah bar Nahmani

Origins and early life

Rabbah bar Nahmani was born about 270 in Sasanian Babylonia into a priestly Jewish family, and he was a Jew, a rabbi and the head of one of the two great academies of Babylonian Jewry; nothing else can be said of him, and nothing else needs to be.

Work and career

He studied under Rav Huna at Sura and under Rav Yehudah at Pumbedita, and on the latter's death about 299 he became head of the Pumbedita academy, which he led for some twenty-two years. His nickname in the Talmud is oker harim, uprooter of mountains: where his colleague Rav Yosef was called Sinai for the mass of tradition he had memorized, Rabbah was the man who could take two apparently unrelated cases, set them against each other, and force out the principle that governed both.

That method — question, objection, distinction, resolution — is the argumentative engine of the Babylonian Talmud, and Rabbah's discussions with Rav Yosef and with his own students fill hundreds of its pages; the tradition holds that a majority of anonymous Talmudic argumentation descends from his school. Twelve thousand students are said to have come to Pumbedita for the kallah, the study months, though the Talmud's numbers are not census figures.

Later years

He died about 330 in circumstances the Talmud relates at length in Bava Metzia: accused before the Persian authorities of causing thousands of men to neglect the poll tax during the study season, he fled into the marshes and died alone, and the sages said that heaven had called him to settle a dispute of the law. Whatever the story's shape, the flight before a state that taxed Jewish study is historical. Jewish law is argued in his method to this day.