Pinhas ben Yair was a second-century rabbi remembered for an unnerving combination of piety and practical wisdom. He was the son-in-law of Rabbi Shimon ben Yochai, and stories about him pile up in the Talmud Yerushalmi and in later collections. The Exempla, drawing on Codex Gaster 185, preserves four of them as a single cluster.
In the first story, a group of travelers stopped to rest in Pinhas ben Yair's region, and when they moved on, one of them accidentally left behind a measure of grain. No one came back for it. Pinhas took the grain and planted it in his field. Year after year, he harvested the crop that grew from it, stored the harvest, and planted some of the yield again. When the original travelers or their descendants eventually passed through again, he opened his barns and gave them all that had grown from the forgotten measure. He had kept the lost property safe not as a bag of grain but as a living inheritance.
In the second story, a plague of mice descended on the local fields. Pinhas ben Yair saw the cause before the others did. "You have been neglecting the tithe on your produce," he told the people. "The mice are the warning. Tithe what you harvest, and the mice will leave." They obeyed. The mice left.
In the third story, a young girl had fallen into a river and been swept away. The village grieved her as dead. Pinhas told them she was alive, and directed where she would be found. They found her.
In the fourth, he came to the bank of a river on his way to a mitzvah, and the river was too swollen to cross. Pinhas told the waters to part. The Exempla reports, without elaboration, that they did. The waters divided before him, as they had divided for Moses at the sea and for Joshua at the Jordan. A rabbi on his way to do God's work can sometimes claim the same road the prophets walked.