רבי נחמיה

Rabbi Nechemiah was among the great tannaim of the fourth generation, in the second century. He was one of the great talmidim of Rabbi Akiva, and among the chachamim who received semicha in secret from Rabbi Yehudah ben Bava in the years when the Roman rule forbade giving semicha. The Yerushalmi traces his descent to Nechemiah of the Tanach.

Rabbi Yochanan taught that an anonymous Tosefta is Rabbi Nechemiah, and all follow Rabbi Akiva; Rav Sherira Gaon explains that this does not mean every such halachah was said by him, but that it came down through his beit midrash. He is cited nineteen times in the Mishnah, three of them in aggadah, and the Gemara brings many machlokot between him and Rabbi Yehudah bar Ilai in the drash of pesukim — on “vatishlach et amatah,” Rabbi Yehudah expounds that the arm of the daughter of Pharaoh stretched out many amot by a nes, while Rabbi Nechemiah says she sent her maidservant.

He taught: through the sin of sinat chinam, quarrel abounds within a man’s home, his wife loses her unborn children, and his sons and daughters die young. Some ascribe to him Mishnat HaMiddot, the earliest known Hebrew sefer of geometry, which explains the measures of the yam that Shlomo made (Melachim I 7:23): the ten-amah diameter was measured at the outer brim and the thirty-amah circumference along the inner brim, with a tefach of rim between them.