Monobaz was a prince of the royal house of Adiabene, a small kingdom east of the Tigris whose royal family famously converted to Judaism in the first century CE. His mother Queen Helena is remembered in the Mishnah for her gifts to the Temple. Monobaz is remembered for something quieter.
A terrible famine struck the region during his reign. The royal treasury — heavy with gold accumulated by his father and grandfather over generations — sat locked in the vaults. Monobaz opened the vaults. And he emptied them into the hands of the starving poor.
The Family Council Outrages
His relatives came to him, furious. "Your fathers stored up treasures! They added to the treasures of their own fathers! You are scattering what took generations to gather. What will be left for your children?"
Monobaz did not argue. He answered them calmly with a sentence that became one of the most-cited lines of rabbinic generosity theology, preserved in Bava Batra 11a and collected by Gaster in 1924:
"My fathers laid up treasure on the earth. I have laid up treasure in heaven. My fathers laid up treasure where human hands could reach it. I have laid up treasure where no hand can touch it. My fathers laid up treasure that bears no fruit. I have laid up treasure that bears fruit forever. My fathers stored up for others. I have stored up for myself. My fathers stored up money. I have stored up souls."
The Inversion
The Sages preserved Monobaz's reply because it inverts the usual language of inheritance. A king typically hoards so his children can inherit. Monobaz gave away so his children could inherit something better: the merit of a father who had fed the hungry in a year of famine.
The only treasure that reaches the next world is the treasure you spent feeding the people of this one.