Activity of Raba

Activity of Raba.

The pupils of Rab and Samuel, the leading amoraim of the second half of the third century—Huna, hisda, Nahman b. Jacob, Sheshet, and the Judah mentioned above, who is especially prominent as a transmitter of the sayings of his two teachers—added a mass of material to the Talmud; and the last-named founded the Academy of Pumbedita, where, as at Sura, the development of the Talmud was continued. Pumbedita was likewise the birth-place of that casuistic and hair-splitting method of interpreting and criticizing halakic passages which forms the special characteristic of the Babylonian Talmud, although the scholars of this academy devoted themselves also to the study of the collections of tannaitic traditions; and at the beginning of the fourth century the representatives of the two movements, "Sinai" Joseph and Rabbah, the "uprooter of mountains," succeeded their master Judah and became the directors of the school. Their sayings and controversies, together with the still more important dicta and debates of their pupils Abaye and Raba, form a considerable part of the material of the Talmud, which was greatly increased at the same time by the halakic and haggadic sentences brought from Palestine to Babylon. All the six orders of the Mishnah were then studied, as is statedby Raba (not Rabba; see Rabbinovicz, "DiKduKe Soferim," on Ta'anit, p. 144), although in Judah's time the lectures had been confined to the fourth order, or, according to the view of Weiss ("Dor," iii. 187), which is probably correct, to the first four orders (comp. Meg. 28b; Ta'an. 24a, b; Sanh. 106b; Raba's pupil Pappa expresses a similar view in Ber. 20a).

Rab's activity marks the culmination of the work on the Talmud. The time had now come when the preservation and arrangement of the material already collected were more important than further accretions. Nahman b. Isaac, pupil and successor of Raba (d. 352), whom he survived but four years, expressed the task of the epigoni in the following words (Pes. 105b): "I am neither a sage nor a seer, nor even a scholar as contrasted with the majority. I am a transmitter ["gamrana"] and an arranger ["sadrana"]." The combination of the former term with the latter, which occurs only here, very concisely summarizes the activity of the redactor. It is clear that Nahman b. Isaac actually engaged in this task from the fact that he is mentioned as the Babylonian amora who introduced Mnemonics ("simanim"), designed to facilitate the memorizing and grouping of Talmudic passages and the names of their authors. The mnemonics ascribed to him in the Talmud (see J. Brüll, "Die Mnemonotechnik des Talmuds," p. 21; Bacher, "Ag. Bab. Amor." p. 134), however, constitute only a very small part of the simanim included in the text of that work. These again form but a remnant of the entire mass of what N. Brüll ("Jahrb." ii. 60) terms the "mnemotechnic apparatus," of which only a portion was included in the printed text of the Talmud, although many others may be traced both in the manuscripts of the Talmud and in ancient citations (see N. Brüll, l.c. pp. 62 et seq., 118 et seq.). The material, to which the epigoni of the second half of the fourth century had added little, was now ready for its final redaction; and it was definitively edited by Ashi (d. 427), who during his long period of activity infused fresh life into the Academy of Sura. In view of his recognized authority, little was left for the two succeeding generations, except to round out the work, since another redaction was no longer possible. The work begun by Ashi was completed by Rabina (Abina), whose death in 499 marks, according to an ancient tradition, the end of the amoraic period and the completion of the redaction of the Talmud.