Rabbah bar bar Hana was the Talmud's greatest traveler of the impossible. His sea voyages, recorded in Bava Batra 73a–b, describe creatures so vast they reshape the geography around them.
Once, his ship encountered a fish so enormous that a mud-eating parasite had lodged in its nostril and killed it. The sea threw the dead fish onto shore. Sixty cities were destroyed by the impact. Sixty more cities ate from its flesh. Sixty more cities salted the remaining meat for preservation. From a single eyeball, they filled three hundred flasks of oil. When Rabbah bar bar Hana returned twelve months later, workers were still cutting beams from its bones to rebuild the cities it had destroyed.
On another voyage, his ship came upon a fish covered in sand and grass. The sailors assumed it was an island. They disembarked, baked bread, and cooked meals on its back. When the fish's skin grew hot, it flipped over. If their ship had not been close by, they would have drowned.
Another time, the ship sailed between a single fish's two fins for three days and three nights. The fish was swimming upstream against the wind. The ship was sailing with it. And this was no slow vessel—Rav Dimi testified that it could travel sixty parasangs in the time it takes to boil a kettle of water.
A day-old antelope was as large as Mount Tabor, with a neck three parasangs long. A frog the size of a fortress was swallowed by a snake, which was swallowed by a raven—and the raven sat in a tree that somehow bore the weight of all three.
Rav Pappa bar Shmuel said: "If I had not been there and seen this, I would not believe it." These visions echo the Psalmist's praise of God's vast creations: "There go the ships; there is that Leviathan, which You have made to play therein" (Psalms 104:26). The Talmud presents these tales without commentary—refusing to say whether they are literal, symbolic, or something beyond both.