Ben Bag Bag dit: Retournez-la [Torah] encore et encore, car [vous y trouverez] tout. Et à travers cela, vous verrez. Et vieillissez-y, et ne bougez pas, car il n'y a pas de meilleur middah que lui. [Ne dites pas: j'ai appris la sagesse d'Israël; Je vais maintenant aller apprendre la sagesse des Grecs. Car il n'est permis de faire ce dernier que là où il n'est pas permis de méditer en paroles de Torah, comme dans les bains ou les toilettes. Lorsqu'ils ont demandé à R. Yehoshua s'il était permis d'enseigner la sagesse grecque à son fils, il a répondu qu'il était permis de le faire quand il n'était ni jour ni nuit, il est écrit (Josué 1: 8): "Et vous méditerez en jour et nuit. "]
He said about the Torah that one should search in it and meditate upon it, as everything is in it. And he said, "And in it should you see (techezei)," meaning to say the truth. [The explanation is that] you will see the truth with the eye of the intellect, like the [Aramaic] translation of vayira (and he saw) is vechaza. And afterwards he said, "and grow old and be worn in it" - to say, occupy yourself with it until the time of old age; and even then, do not veer from it to something else.
BEN BAG BAG. Perhaps he and Ben Hey Hey did not live long, as Rav writes on the mishna in 4:1-2 concerning the names Ben Zoma and Ben Azai. Midrash Shmuel, however, writes that Rashbam writes that he heard from his uncle, R. Yehudah the son of Rosh, that they were converts and were called this to protect them from informers.238Who would have revealed their location to the government. This explanation presumes that conversion to Judaism was a crime under the Romans. Although Constantine made this the official rule of the empire only in 329 C.E., individual adverse reactions to conversion are attested (Dio Cassius reports that in 19 C.E. the Jews were expelled from Rome for “converting many of the natives to their ways”). They were thus the children of Abraham and Sarah, to whose names a hey was added and who were the first converts, for which reason all converts are considered their children. The alphanumeric value of Bag is five, as is that of the letter hey, and the two names are thus the same kind of name, with Ben Bag Bag being more cryptic and hidden; they gave them two different names to differentiate between the two.