Rav Huna

Origins and early life

Rav Huna was born about 216 in Babylonia into a poor Jewish family that claimed descent from the house of David, and he was a Jew, a rabbi, and the head of the academy of Sura; nothing else is recorded of him, and nothing else is needed.

Work and career

He studied under Rav, the founder of that academy, and after the death of Rav's successor took the leadership about the year 257, holding it for some forty years. The Talmud says he had eight hundred students in his lecture hall and that thirteen assistants were needed to repeat his words to the rows that could not hear him; whatever the exactness of the number, his tenure is the moment when Babylonia overtook the Land of Israel as the centre of Jewish learning, and the sages of Galilee began sending their questions east.

He was famous for a plainness that the tradition preserved in detail: he had been so poor that he pawned his belt to buy wine for the Sabbath, and when he became rich he would open the doors of his house at mealtimes and call out that whoever was hungry should come and eat; he bought up the vegetables left unsold in the market so that growers would not lose by them, and he walked the streets after storms with a spade to repair the walls of poor houses.

Rulings of his fill the Babylonian Talmud, and his students — Rabbah bar Nahmani, Rav Hisda, Rav Nahman and the generation that shaped the whole work — carried his method forward. He died about 297; the Talmud reports that his coffin was carried to the Land of Israel for burial, an honour given to almost no one of the exile.