רב שמואל בן חפני גאון

Rav Shmuel ben Chofni HaKohen (niftar 25 Av 4773/1013), known by the acronym the Rashbach, was the gaon of the yeshiva of Sura in Bavel from about 998. His father, Rav Chofni HaKohen, held one of the senior rabbinic posts of the Babylonian yeshivot as dayana d’bava, and Rav Shmuel was joined by marriage to the house of Pumbedita: his daughter married Rav Hai Gaon, son of Rav Sherira. His own son, Rav Yisrael, was the last gaon of Sura.

He was a prolific author — some sixty-five works are counted — written mostly in Judeo-Arabic, spanning peirush on the Chumash, peirush on the Talmud, halachah, Talmudic methodology, and machshavah. He composed systematic treatises on discrete areas of law — the laws of tzitzit, of berachot, of divorce, of expenditures, and many more — as well as an introduction to the Talmud, and he wrote teshuvot in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Arabic. Most of these sefarim were lost after the decline of the Babylonian center, and were recovered only in part with the discovery of the Cairo Genizah.

In his peirush on the Torah he first explained each difficult word and then the pasuk as a whole, and he is counted among the foremost baalei peshat of the geonic age; his translation into Arabic held closer to the Hebrew than that of Rav Saadia Gaon before him, keeping the names of places and lands in their original form. He was a rationalist who set reason high: he rejected belief in sheidim, in sorcery, and in astrology, and held that a change in the order of nature can come only through a navi and not through the tzaddikim. So he explained the account of the woman of Ein Dor not as a raising of Shmuel from his grave but as her deception — a reading his son-in-law Rav Hai Gaon opposed.