Rav Huna רב הונא

Berakhot 5b relates: four hundred barrels of Rav Huna's wine turned to vinegar. The sages came and said: let the master examine his deeds. He asked: am I suspected of something? They answered: is the Holy One suspected of judging without justice?

It then emerged what the matter was: he had not been giving his sharecropper his due share of the vine. He said: I undertake to give it—and the wine, by one account, turned back into wine, and by another rose in price so that there was no loss.

The number is often misquoted: in the Gemara it is four hundred barrels, not eight hundred, and the story stands in Berakhot, not in Bava Metzia.

More important than the number is the method. The sages neither console him nor explain the misfortune by a plan from above. They propose examining his own conduct—and find a perfectly concrete breach of an agreement with a worker.

Rav Huna headed Sura for some forty years; by the accounts, eight hundred students learned there in his day, and he supported the poor among them out of his own means.