Rav Yosef bar Hiyya

Origins and early life

Rav Yosef bar Hiyya was born about 270 in Babylonia, a Jew and a rabbi of the third generation of the amoraim, and he spent his life in the academy of Pumbedita, where he was the colleague and rival of Rabbah bar Nahmani, who has his own fiche on this site.

Work and career

The Talmud contrasts them in a phrase that has become proverbial: Rabbah was the uprooter of mountains, the dialectician who forced principles out of cases, while Yosef was called Sinai, because he held in memory the whole received tradition, every teaching of the earlier sages as it had been handed down. When the two were offered the leadership of the academy, the sages asked which is preferable, Sinai or the uprooter of mountains, and the answer given was Sinai, since everyone needs the owner of the wheat; Yosef nevertheless deferred, and Rabbah led for twenty-two years, after which Yosef headed the academy for the last two and a half years of his life.

He went blind in his later years and continued to teach, and the Talmud preserves his rulings on the obligations of the blind in Jewish law, argued from his own situation. He is credited with the Aramaic Targum of the Prophets in the form the Babylonian schools used, and citations introduced as 'as Rav Yosef translated' run through the Talmud; whether he composed or transmitted it is debated. Where his generation's contribution is asked for plainly, it is this: the memory of a tradition that existed nowhere but in the heads of men, kept exactly, in a language and a country not its own, and handed to the generation that wrote it down. He died at Pumbedita in 333.