The impossible creatures of Rabbah bar bar Hana's voyages continue in Bava Batra 73b, each one more staggering than the last—a catalog of wonders that pushed the boundaries of the natural world into the realm of mythology.
He reported seeing a frog the size of the fortress of Hagronya—a fort as large as sixty houses. A snake came and swallowed the frog whole. Then a raven came and swallowed the snake. The raven flew up and perched in a tree. "Come and see," the Talmud remarks, "how great is the strength of the tree"—a tree that held a raven that held a snake that held a frog the size of a small city.
On another voyage, Rabbah bar bar Hana saw a bird standing in shallow water that came only to its ankles. The water was so deep that a carpenter's axe dropped into it took seven years to reach the bottom. The bird was not standing in shallow water at all—the water was bottomlessly deep, and the bird was simply that tall.
These stories functioned on multiple levels. The Maharsha, a later commentator, read them as allegories for spiritual concepts. The enormous fish whose bones rebuilt cities represented Torah wisdom—even its remnants generate new structures of meaning. The island that turned out to be a living creature warned against mistaking temporary resting places for solid ground.
But the Talmud itself offers no interpretive key. It records these tales as firsthand testimony, challenged only by the single remark of Rav Pappa bar Shmuel: "If I had not been there, I would not believe it." As the verse says: "How great are Your works, O Lord! Your thoughts are very deep" (Psalms 92:6). The listener is left to decide: are these the tall tales of an unreliable narrator, or a genuine record of a world whose wonders have since vanished? The Talmud seems content with the ambiguity.