רבי יהושע דסכנין

Rabbi Yehoshua of Sikhni (Rabbi Yehoshua deSichnin) was an amora of the fourth generation in Eretz Yisrael, who lived and taught in the fourth century. His home was the village of Sichnin in the Lower Galil, where tradition places his kever and that of his wife beside the kever of Rabbi Shimon of Sichnin; over the generations the site drew Jewish pilgrims and the Arabs of the Galil alike.

He was a talmid of Rabbi Levi and one of the outstanding baalei aggada of Eretz Yisrael. The Talmud Yerushalmi and the midrashim bring many teachings of aggada that he states in the name of his rebbe, Rabbi Levi; in the Talmud Bavli he is mentioned only once. Among his sayings: that peace is so great that all the berachot and tefillot conclude with shalom (Derech Eretz Zuta); that Hashem took the ordinary speech of the Avot and made it a key to the redemption of their children (Bereishit Rabba); and, together with Rabbi Yose of Milchaya, that the children of David’s day, who had not yet tasted sin, could expound the Torah in forty-nine ways for tuma and forty-nine for tahara, yet went out to battle and fell because there were talebearers among them, while the generation of Achav, idolaters all, went out and won because they had none (Midrash Tanchuma).

His kever in Sichnin holds a sarcophagus (stone coffin) of the Roman period. The Arabs call the place a-Nabi a-Sadik and hold it sacred as well; the Bedouin of the Arab a-Na’im tribe would come there to swear their oaths and to pray for the health of their children, and the villagers took care to ask the tzaddik’s pardon when passing at night. An anonymous Jewish pilgrim of the fourteenth century described it: Rav Yehoshua of Kfar Sichnin lying in a stone coffin under a fine stone cover, with two tzaddikim beside him in their own coffins, all within one house.