Ravina I

Origins and early life

Ravina, a Jew and a Babylonian amora of the sixth and seventh generations, worked at Sura and at Mata Mehasya in the late fourth and early fifth centuries and died about 422.

Work and career

The Talmud names him with Rav Ashi, who has his own fiche on this site, in the sentence that closes its own account of itself: Rav Ashi and Ravina are sof hora'ah, the end of instruction — the point at which the long argument of the amoraim was gathered, sifted and set in the order that became the Babylonian Talmud. This fiche states plainly what that means and does not mean. The Talmud was not written by two men at a desk; it grew through generations of oral debate in the academies and was given its form over a century of editorial work by many hands, and the ancient sources themselves distinguish two men called Ravina, the elder who worked with Rav Ashi and his grand-nephew Ravina bar Huna, who died about 500 and to whom the final redaction is traditionally credited.

Which of them did what is debated by historians, and this fiche does not pretend otherwise. What is certain is the achievement: a body of two and a half million words in Hebrew and Aramaic, containing the legal reasoning, the disagreements, the stories, the medicine, the astronomy and the folklore of the Babylonian academies, arranged as a commentary on the Mishnah and preserving the minority opinion beside the majority.

It became the book on which Jewish life was organized for the next fifteen centuries, in every country of the exile, and the reason a scattered people kept one law. Ravina's own rulings appear throughout it, often in dialogue with Rav Ashi.