Rav Hisda

Origins and early life

Rav Hisda was born about 217 at Kafri in Babylonia, a Jew of a priestly family that was poor in his youth; he studied under Rav and then under Rav Huna at Sura, and this fiche has nothing to record of him but a life spent in the study and teaching of Jewish law, which is the whole of his contribution and enough.

Work and career

He and Rav Huna quarrelled and were estranged for years, and the Talmud, which does not hide such things, tells how they were reconciled; on Huna's death about 297 Hisda succeeded him as head of the academy of Sura, which he led into his nineties. His rulings run through the Talmud on marriage and divorce, on ritual purity, on the laws of mourning and on the liturgy, and he was known for a scrupulous exactness in questions of evidence.

He is remembered as well for a body of practical advice that reads today like preventive medicine: he taught that one should not sit too long, that eating hot bread and drinking after it prevents illness, that a house should have windows for light, that the sick must be visited and the mourner comforted, and he insisted on cleanliness of hands and vessels in terms that anticipate hygiene by centuries. He grew wealthy in the beer trade and used the money for the academy and for the poor.

The Talmud records that he had seven sons and seven daughters and that he lived to ninety-two, attributing it, in his own words, to having eaten warm food and drunk warm water every day. He died about 309 at Sura, and the discussions of Hisda and his colleagues are among the layers from which the Babylonian Talmud was built.