Birth
His father, who subsequently was known only by the Aramaic language designation Abuh di-Shemu'el ("father of Samuel"), was a silk-merchant. R. Judah ben Bathyra ordered a silken garment from him, but refused to take it after Abba had procured it, and when the latter asked him the reason of his refusal, R. Judah answered, "The commission was only a spoken word, and was not sufficient to make the transaction binding." Abba thereupon said, "Is the word of a sage not a better guarantee than his money?" "You are right," said R. Judah; "and because you lay so much stress upon a given word you shall have the good fortune of having a son who shall be like the prophet Samuel, and whose word all Israel will recognize as true." Soon afterward a son was born to Abba, whom he named Samuel (Midr. Shemu'el, x. ).
Read more about this topic: Samuel Of Nehardea
Famous quotes containing the word birth:
“Wealth, howsoever got, in England makes
Lords of mechanics, gentlemen of rakes;
Antiquity and birth are needless here;
‘Tis impudence and money makes a peer.”
—Daniel Defoe (1660–1731)
“Before the birth of the New Woman the country was not an intellectual desert, as she is apt to suppose. There were teachers of the highest grade, and libraries, and countless circles in our towns and villages of scholarly, leisurely folk, who loved books, and music, and Nature, and lived much apart with them. The mad craze for money, which clutches at our souls to-day as la grippe does at our bodies, was hardly known then.”
—Rebecca Harding Davis (1831–1910)
“There is a certain class of people who prefer to say that their fathers came down in the world through their own follies than to boast that they rose in the world through their own industry and talents. It is the same shabby-genteel sentiment, the same vanity of birth which makes men prefer to believe that they are degenerated angels rather than elevated apes.”
—W. Winwood Reade (1838–1875)