Ravnai (article summary)

My article from last Shabbat, from the Jewish Link was about the opening page of Bava Metzia, and a Sage named Ravnai (paid Substack, Jewish Link, flipbooks). Here is a shorter summary of the article.

1. A joke from my father about the opening Mishnah, shnayim ochazin.

2. The beginning sugya analyzes the Mishnah and its style, and is quite Stammaic stylistically. The Talmudic Narrator suggests that the duplicative Mishnaic language of not just אֲנִי מְצָאתִיהָ but also כֻּלָּהּ שֶׁלִּי is there to teach that mere seeing doesn’t acquire. The Talmudic Narrator then asks how this mistaken assumption could have arisen in the first place, for Ravnai said that the Biblical word וּמְצָאתָ֑הּ has implications of actually entering his hand. Note that this Amora name occurrence doesn’t spoil the Stammaic nature of the passage. It is the Narrator channeling a named Amora.

3. Examine Ravnai’s statement in its original context, the primary sugya, Bava Kamma 113. That context is IMHO different from how it is used locally. In Bava Kamma, in certain cases you need not return a lost item you see on the street, which means that you can either keep it or that you can just keep walking and ignore it, and there was a derasha of אָחִיךָ as an exclusion to that effect. Perhaps that allowance to not bother returning it was only before you actively had it in your possession. To this, Ravnai said that the wording of the pasuk, and thus the exclusion, was וּמְצָאתָ֑הּ, that it was already in your hand — that is, in your possession. (That also means that spying it in the street at a distance doesn’t work.)

4. In that Bava Kamma context, must we be speaking of literal occupying the airspace of your hand? Or, can it just mean that it is already “acquired” by you, either that you can keep it, or that it is in your domain / responsibility, in a manner that would typically result from a kinyan? I don’t know, but we can survey the phrase דַּאֲתַי לִידֵיהּ and see if a pattern emerges.

5. Conduct such a survey. From the examples, it seems that it indeed can mean conceptual control. If so, maybe Ravnai would agree that some seeing would work, if that would place it under his conceptual control.

6. Indeed, there’s an explicit gemara noted by Tosafot where mere sight seems to work. They answer that there was also a minor physical act of acquisition accompanying the sight. But we might seize on the question, more than the answer.

7. The question about whether you can acquire from mere sight seems to tap into a debate in a later Mishna (Bava Metzia 1:4), about whether one’s four cubits acquire for him. This is especially so in the Yerushalmi parallel.

8. At first I thought Ravnai was a transposition error, since I saw Ravina in the primary sugya even in manuscripts. But I’m convinced from manuscripts in other sugyot that Ravnai is a plausible reading, and lectio difficilior then recommends it - who would change from Ravina to Ravnai?!

9. Ravnai’s bio. Second-generation student of Shmuel along with his brother in Bavel. His brother made aliyah and also learned from Rabbi Yochanan. He is likely the same as Ravnai brother of Rabbi Chiyya bar Abba. His name is a contraction of Rav Benai.