רבי שמעון בן אבישלום

Rav Shimon ben Avishalom was an amora and a baal aggadah whose time and place are not clearly known. Because he is mentioned in the Bavli alone and not in the Yerushalmi, it is generally assumed that he was one of the amoraim of Bavel, and because his teachings are almost all aggadah, that this was his main occupation. Beyond that, the sources say nothing of his life.

He appears in the Gemara only a handful of times. On the mizmor that opens “A song of David, when he fled from Avshalom his son,” the Gemara asks why David said a song at such an hour rather than a lament, and brings his answer as a mashal: a man against whom a note of debt has gone out is troubled until he pays it, and glad once it is paid. So with David — when Hashem told him that evil would rise against him out of his own house he was troubled, saying that it might be a slave or a mamzer who would have no pity on him; when he saw that it was Avshalom, he was glad. In another place, on Devorah the neviah, who sat and judged the people beneath a date palm, he teaches that she sat so because of the prohibition of yichud: in the open, without walls, under a tree whose branches are high. And on the Mishnah about one who sells a city, where the sale is taken to include the santar, he explains that word to mean the fields around the city.