רב חמא

Rav Chama was a Babylonian amora of the fifth generation and one of the chachamim of the yeshiva of Nehardea, with which he was so closely identified that it gave him his byname, “Nehardei.” He is mentioned dozens of times in the Talmud Bavli. A colleague of Rav Papa, he headed a well-known beit din and issued many rulings in dinei mamonot; and because the Gemara treats the chachamim of Nehardea as holding one shared approach, it links his words to those of Shmuel, who founded the yeshiva and headed it.

Rav Chama was himself a merchant, and one of his practices became a sugya in the laws of ribbit. He would sell goods in a town where they were cheap at the higher price of a distant land, while taking responsibility for the goods until the buyers brought them there, so that they paid only once the goods had arrived safely and been sold. This looked like interest, but Rav Chama explained that since the goods remained his until they were sold, the time of payment had not arrived any earlier. The buyers accepted the higher price for another reason: when a talmid chacham brought goods to market, the chachamim of the town proclaimed that no one might sell like goods until his were gone, and no tax was taken on them, so it served the buyers to keep the goods in Rav Chama’s name. The Gemara rules in accordance with Rav Chama.

He taught that one who gave money to a friend to buy wine in the season when it sells cheaply, and the friend was negligent and did not buy, must pay in wine at the cheap price of Parvata deZulshefat, where wine was cheap at the vintage — the principle that whoever holds another’s money idle and keeps him from profit must make it good. His talmid was Ameimar, who cites in his name a rule for a man with one sum of money and two claimants, his creditor and his divorced wife seeking her ketubah: the creditor is paid, so that lenders, who may take no interest, are not discouraged from lending, whereas there is no fear that women will decline to marry — for more than a man wants to marry, a woman wants to be married.