On today’s daf, we continue the adventures of Rabbah bar bar Hanna, who yesterday brought us fantastic stories of enormous creatures seen at sea. This time, we meet the traveling rabbi in the desert. And instead of seeing the wonders of the natural world (big fish! enormous trees!), Rabbah bar bar Hanna is shown some of the pivotal moments of biblical history, with a nomadic Arab as his tour guide. Let’s look at just one example from the daf:
He said to me: “Come, I will show you the dead of the wilderness.” I went and saw them; and they had the appearance of one who is intoxicated, and they were lying on their backs. And the knee of one of them was elevated, and the nomadic Arab entered under his knee while riding a camel and with his spear upright, and he did not touch him.
In Numbers 14:29, we learn that God sentenced all those who left Egypt as adults to die in the desert without entering the land of Israel. Here, some 1,500 years later (according to biblical chronology), an unnamed Arab shows Rabbah bar bar Hanna where their bodies are. Apparently, the bodies of the fallen Israelites were perfectly preserved and also enormous. People sometimes refer to their ancestors as “great,” but the Talmud takes this descriptor literally.
What does the traveling rabbi do when he sees this evidence of the biblical past?
I cut one corner of the tekhelet fringes of one of them, and our camels refused to move on. The Arab said to me: “Perhaps you took something from them? Return it, as we learned in a tradition that one who takes something from them cannot walk.” I then returned it, and then we were able to walk.
American national parks today often have signs that instruct visitors to take only pictures and leave only footprints, a reminder not to disturb the ecosystem. So too, it is (apparently) forbidden to take mementos from the sites of key biblical moments. Instead of park rangers, it is God who enforces that rule, refusing to allow the caravan to move on until the stolen tzitzit are returned.
How do the rabbis react when Rabbah bar bar Hannah returns to the rabbinic community and tells them what he saw?
When I came to the house of study, they said to me, “Every Abba is an ass and every bar Hana is a braggart. What were you intending to learn?! Whether the strings and knots of their tzitzit followed either Beit Shammai or Beit Hillel?! You should have just counted them and reported it!”
The rabbis assume that Rabbah bar bar Hanna tried to take a memento as an attempt to definitely resolve a halakhic debate which happened 1,000 years after the Israelites ostensibly died in the wilderness. But it would have been more respectful to simply count the fringes and knots without robbing the corpses. (And given that the rabbis rule that halakhic debates between Beit Hillel and Beit Shammai almost always follow Beit Hillel, the whole attempt seems kind of unnecessary).
Over and over again, the Talmud tells us that Rabbah bar bar Hana sees remarkable things, and then returns to the study house to report on his adventures. And over and over, the rabbis, upon hearing his amazing stories, insult him, and point out that he made poor choices. But why?
The adventures of Rabbah bar bar Hana have been studied from a wide variety of angles. While some scholars have suggested that it’s just a rabbinic tall tale, most scholars today see it as something more: a rabbinic rejection of the contemporary (largely Christian) practice of religious pilgrimage, a text that proves the reality of Jewish readings of the Bible over those of Christians, a text that valorizes rabbinic ways of knowing (Torah study and rabbinic reason) over other ways of knowing (observation), or something else entirely.
For more on the adventures of Rabbah bar bar Hanna, a bibliography of scholarly works about this figure, and an exploration of the role of the Arab tour guide, see Sara Ronis, “Imagining the Other: The Magical Arab in the Babylonian Talmud” (Prooftexts: A Journal of Jewish Literary History).
Read all of Bava Batra 74 on Sefaria.
This piece originally appeared in a My Jewish Learning Daf Yomi email newsletter sent on September 7, 2024. If you are interested in receiving the newsletter, sign up here.
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