Av Beit Din, Av Beis Din, or Abh Beyth Diyn, (abbreviated: AB"D, (Hebrew: אב בית דין, "Chief of the Court"). was the second-highest ranking member of the Sanhedrin during the Second Commonwealth period. The president, who bore the title Nasi, was in a way the supervisor, but not a member of the court, which consisted of seventy members. The most learned and important of these seventy members was called Av Beit Din, a title similar to that of vice-president.
The Av Beit Din presided over the Sanhedrin in the absence of the Nasi, and was the chief of the Sanhedrin when it sat as a criminal court. He sat with seven other judges while hearing a case.
In modern times it is used as an honorific title for the presiding rabbi of a beth din (rabbinical court), who is typically the salaried rabbi of the local Jewish community and usually a posek ("decisor" of Jewish law.) It is also abbreviated as AB"D when it is appended after the name of the Chief Rabbi of a national Jewish community.
Famous quotes containing the word din:
“Through the din and desultoriness of noon, even in the most Oriental city, is seen the fresh and primitive and savage nature, in which Scythians and Ethiopians and Indians dwell. What is echo, what are light and shade, day and night, ocean and stars, earthquake and eclipse, there? The works of man are everywhere swallowed up in the immensity of nature. The AEgean Sea is but Lake Huron still to the Indian.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)