Mar Kashisha b. Rav Chisda (article summary)

Summarizing a recent article. You can read it in full here (paid Substack, Jewish Link HTML, flipdocs) or zoom in on the image below.

Read it inside, but here are some bullet points.

1. We’re exploring this because Mar Kashisha b. Rav Chisda speaks to Rav Ashi on 17b. Is he really the son of third-generation Rav Chisda, and speaking to sixth-generation Rav Ashi?

2. Well, he often indeed speaks with Rav Ashi, and is often accompanied by his brother Mar Yenoka. The chronological constraints make an interesting puzzle — how could they be sons of Rav Chisda?
   
   There is one instance where he speaks with Abaye, but this is a scribal error, and I show a manuscript that it should be Rav Ashi.
   

3. Grapple more with the chronology. There is Rashi vs. Tosafot about who was older and younger. Kashisha means old while Yenoka means young, so these seem like relative terms, like Pliny the Elder and Pliny the Younger. But maybe it means born in Rav Chisda’s relative youth vs. born in Rav Chisda’s old age. But, as Rav Hyman points out, Rav Chisda lived to about 90, so having someone born in Rav Chisda’s youth interact with several-generations later Rav Ashi doesn’t work.
   
   Rav Hyman would have preferred a different Rav Chisda, but feels compelled by there being only one plain Rav Chisda without patronymic. I don’t know that we need to tag the one without patronymic, or that we cannot tag plain Rabbi Chisda who is of a more appropriate generation.
   

4. Rav Hyman therefore thinks that they were both born in Rav Chisda’s old age, didn’t really interact with him scholastically, and were old enough to be mature, older talmidei chachamim within the much younger Rav Ashi’s yeshiva.
   

5. Go through a bunch of interactions which explore the Rav Ashi / Mar Kashisha relationship.
   

6. Point out one where Rav Ashi chastises Mar Kashisha for inaccuracy in his citations, something I would see much more as a teacher-student interaction.