Ravin רבין

Ravin (Rav Avin) was one of the "nechutei", who went down from the Land of Israel to Babylonia with a cargo of oral teachings. The formula "ki ata Ravin"—"when Ravin came"—stands in the Talmud hundreds of times, and almost always somewhere beside it is "when Rav Dimi came and said otherwise".

That juxtaposition is one of the most valuable things in the Talmud for anyone who wants to understand how the oral was transmitted. Two men of one generation, travelling one road, bring one teaching in two versions; the study house of Abaye and Rava weighs whose recension is the more exact, and says aloud what usually stays off stage: tradition lives in people, and people remember differently.

What he carried came above all from the school of Rabbi Yochanan, through its later disciples; and so it is from Ravin that the Babylonian academies know much of what is written in the Yerushalmi.

The sources give no years of life; the window of activity is set by generation, following Aharon Hyman's Toldot Tannaim ve-Amoraim.