Rav Giddel

Who is Rav Giddel?

Rav Giddel was a second generation Amora sage of Babylon and the Land of Israel. Abba Arika was his Teacher par excellence. Dozens of times he delivers Abba Arika's work in the Talmud - which many of them he heard indirectly from his teacher Hiyya b. Joseph, and in rare occasions he also delivers the work of R. Ze'iri.

After the death of Abba Arika, Rav Giddel went to study under Rav Huna. Rav Huna was prolonging his lessons and teachings of the Talmud, and many of his students, among them Rav Giddel, restrained themselves from going to their needs during the lessons, and became infertile, and could not have more children.

Later on he moved to live in the Land of Israel, in the Beth midrash of Yochanan bar Nafcha in Tiberias. In that conjunction, it is storied that Amora R. Abba was a head of Rav Giddel in buying a field that Rav Giddel was already engaged in the process of buying it. The case came to the attention of R. Isaac Nappaha, who asked R. abbba: "If a poor man is examining a cake and another comes and takes it away from him, what then?", and R. Abba replied: "He is called a wicked man". R. Abba explained to R. Isaac Nappaha that he did not know that Rav Giddel was already eying the field, and now that he knows the background of all of it he is ready to give it to him as a gift but not to sell it to him, since selling your first field is not a good omen. Rav Giddel refused to accept it as a gift, in accordance with the verse in the Book of Proverbs : "he that hateth gifts shall live". Because both refused to use the field, it remained a No Man's Land, and was then named "The Rabbis’ field"