Kiddushin 39 ~ Half Way There

For those studying the Daf-Yomi, one-page-a-day-cycle, tomorrow is an important day. A very important day. The present cycle of study began 1,355 days ago, on January 5th, 2020. And in another 1,355 days, on Monday June 7, 2027, the cycle will be completed.  And so Kiddushin 39 marks the halfway point, page 1,356. There are 1,355 pages completed, and another 1,355 to go. If you have been studying the last 1355 pages, (or even if you joined at some later time), now is a good opportunity to congratulate yourself, or your favorite daf-yomi teacher.

Are we there Yet? 

If you drove from New York to Los Angeles, it would take you about forty hours of driving to cover the 2,789 miles.  If you took Interstate 80, the halfway point on that journey would be at mile 1,395 which means a pit stop at the Wood River West State Wildlife Management Area in Nebraska.

Travelling from Eilat to Kiryat Shmonah (via Route 90 up the Jordan Valley), your halfway stop would be just south of the Ein Gedi nature reserve (but before you cross the bridge over Nahal Arugot), 146 miles from your start and 146 more miles to go.  

According to the Talmud (קידושין ל,א) that we happened to study a week ago,  the middle letter of the Torah is the Vav of the word Gichon, (גחון) found in פרשת שמיני – Leviticus 11:42. We noted that this traditional halfway point is way off. The actual middle letter of the Torah is letter # 152,403, the first letter of ויקרא פרק ח פסוק כט, which is 4,833 letters sooner than the traditional one.

Where is the Middle of the Torah?
	According to the Talmud	According to the Facts
Middle Letter of the Torah	וא"ו דגחון ויקרא 11:42	וא"ו דויקח ויקרא 8:29
Middle Words of the Torah	דרש דרש ויקרא 10:16	יצק אל ויקרא 8:18

Pagination in the Talmud

Are we making too much of this halfway page, this daf at the center of the Talmud Bavli? Perhaps. If you were to read the Vatican's 1381 manuscript of Kiddushin (shown below) you would see a completely different pagination, and today's daf would not be the halfway point.   

Manuscript of Talmud Bavli, Kiddushin, from the Vatican Apostolic Library (Vat.ebr.111/0222). The beginning of page 39a of the standard talmud in use today is show in red. This is one of three manuscripts in the Vatican Library together comprising all of Seder Nashim. It was copied by Yehoshaya b. Abraham b. Berechiah
b. Abraham b. Joseph of the Joseph Ha-Meoni family for Berechiah b. Mattathias and was completed on 11 Shevat 5141, or January 7th, 1381. Here is the entire colophon:

אני יהושעיה בן הרב ר' אברהם בן הרב ר' ברכיה בר' אברהם בר' יוסף ממשפחת יוסף המעוני כתבתי סדר נשים זה לר' ברכיה בר' מתתיה וסיימתיו בי"א יום לחדש שבט קמ"א לפרט המקום יזכינו
.להגות בו בניו ובני בניו עד סוף כל הדורות. אמן אמן. ברוך הנותן ליעף כח ולאין אונים עצמה ירבה

And below is our page, this time from a hand-written Talmud belonging to the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York. It dates from 1700; clearly the scribe undertook a labor of love in writing this when printed texts were widely available. And in this unique Talmud, Kiddushin 39 is not the middle page.

Talmud Kiddushin,1700.  Page 39a (לט)  is marked. From the Library of The Jewish Theological Seminary, New York, Record # 000009185.

So yes, this page is perhaps nothing more than an interesting by-product of the winning format in which the Talmud is now reproduced.  But we celebrate marathons and half-marathons, even though their length is totally arbitrary, (based on the length of the Marathon in the 1908 London Olympics - 26 miles, 385 yards; 26 miles because, well, who knows, and 385 yards being added so that the race would finish in front of the Royal Box). Running a half-marathon is a remarkable achievement, and so too is studying half of all the pages in the Babylonian Talmud. Congratulations to all who have achieved this milestone. But this is not an opportunity to relax: Don’t you have a sukkah to build?

According to The New York Times (April 6, 2016, p3.) there are 5,422 pages in the Talmud. Which is sort of correct.  And sort of not.  In our standard pagination of the Talmud, one page is made up of the verso and recto (a and b sides) sides. So Daf Yomi according to The Times would take twice as long as it does currently. Another way to look at it is that The New York Times prefers Amud Yomi to Daf Yomi.

Ketuvot 86 ~ 1,000 pages, and Counting

Tomorrow we will study the 1,000th page of Talmud in the current Daf Yomi cycle.  That's right, Ketuvot 86 is the 1,000th page. Here's how:

 64=ברכות 

 157=שבת

105=עירובין

121=פסחים

22=שקלים

88=יומא

56=סוכה

40=ביצה

35=ראש השנה

31=תענית

32=מגילה

29=מועד קטן

27=חגיגה

122=יבמות

86=כתובות

Add that all up and you get...1,015. Whoops? Not really. As you may recall, each new מסכת (tractate) of the Talmud has a title page, but the text always starts on page 2 (ב). So we need to subtract one page for each of the 15 tractates we've covered so far. And 1,015-15=1,000.

Pagination in the Talmud

It wasn't always the case that Ketuvot 86 meant the same thing to all readers. Before the printed Talmud, everything was written by hand, and your particular manuscript (if you were lucky enough to have one) might well differ from that in another town.  Here, for example, is the opening of the ninth chapter of Ketuvot, (the one we are currently studying in this Daf Yomi cycle,) in the 1342 manuscript held in the Munich State Library (Babylonischer Talmud – BSB Cod. heb. 95. 1342.) You'll notice how completely different it looks from anything we have today:

Opening of Ketuvot Chapter 9 (=83a), Babylonischer Talmud – BSB Cod. heb. 95. 1342

According to Marvin Heller (who knows everything about early Hebrew printing and the printing of the Talmud) it was Daniel Bomberg, a Christian printer who lived in Venice, who established the form of the Talmud that we have today.

“The first complete edition of the Babylonian Talmud, the edito princeps, was printed from 1519/20-23. The Bomberg Talmud became a standard for the editions that followed, almost all subsequent editions adhered to his layout and foliation.”

— Marvin Heller. Earliest Printings of the Talmud. In Mintz and Goldstein. Printing the Talmud 2002. p 73.

Bomberg printed the tractate Ketuvot in 1521, and so that is the earliest date we would recognize where we are now- Ketuvot 86, the 1,000th page of the Talmud. 

Some Light Summer Reading Suggestions

There are many novels with 1,000 pages of more. Perhaps you've read JRR Tolkien's Lord of the Rings Trilogy,  or Tolstoy's War and Peace?  What about Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, or Victor Hugo's Les Miserables, (only 1,504 pages, in paperback!) None of them appeal to you? Want something a bit more biblical? Then try Thomas Mann's Joseph and His Brothers, a retelling of a few chapters of Genesis...in 1,400 plus pages. (It must be good - he won a Nobel Prize.) Too high-brow? Then consider Stephen Kings's It (only 1,104 pages) Too scary? Then go for Charles Dicken's classic Bleak House; it's a story about the injustices of the British legal system, and the Penguin Classic edition is 1,096 pages long. Perfect beach reading.  

“I looked up War and Peace and it’s about this guy Pierre who fights in France, and all this terrible stuff happens to him, but in the end because of his charm he gets to be with this girl he really loves, and who really loves him even though she cheated on him.”

— Gary Shtenygart, Super Sad True Love Story

Visualizing Numbers

1

​Back on January 5, 2020 we opened the new cycle of Daf Yomi with Berachot 2.

10

Ten. It's no big deal really, other than we count using base 10 because that's how many fingers we have. We learned the tenth page of  the Talmud (Berachot 11) on January 14, 2020.

Ten is actually of great importance in Judaism. Here are some of the significant ones:

• There were Ten Plagues in Egypt

• There were Ten Commandments. 

• The Torah (Deut. 26:12) commands that the poor be given one-tenth of our produce: כי תכלה לעשר את כל מעשר תבואתך בשנה השלישת שנת המעשר 

• We observe the annual Ten Days of Repentance from ראש השנה to יום כפור.

• There were Ten Martyrs that are rememberer in Jewish prayers on יום כפור.

• There are said to be Ten Lost Tribes of Israel.

• There are Ten Sephirot in the Kabbalah.

• Ten men are needed to make a minyan.

100

We studied the 100th page on April 13, 2020. That was Shabbat 38.  100 is of a special number, it being the square of 10. 

We make a big deal out of 100. It's the basis of our percentage calculations, and we count centuries based on their 100 year cycles. 100 is also the sum of the cubes of the first four integers: 100=[1x1x1]+[2x2x2]+[3x3x3]+[4x4x4].

Rabbi Meir taught that  a person should make 100 ברכות every day ( מנחות דף מג, ב). A person should hear 100 notes blown on the שופר on ראש השנה.

1,000

“1,000 is also a huge deal in our world and has a bunch of nicknames, like a grand, a G, a kilo, and k. It’s also part of the elite chain of numbers in the “order-of-magnitude” chain, which we know as million, billion, trillion, etc. Million is actually the third number in that chain, with the dud 1 as the first number and 1,000 as the second number. And 1,000 is the key multiplier that defines the whole chain.
That said, 1,000’s dirty secret is that it’s a fraud like 10 and can’t be made into a square. The square root of 1,000 is an embarrassing 31.62277660168 etcetera without even a vinculum”

— Tim Urban. From 1 to 1,000. Waitbutwhy.com

So we’ve covered 1,000 pages of the Babylonian Talmud. There are 2,711 pages in all, so we’re not even half-way done. But we’re closer than we were yesterday, and we will be even closer tomorrow. Congratulations to all who've reached this milestone.

Bomberg Talmud Ketuvot, title page 1521. From Marvin Heller, Printing the Talmud; A History of the Earliest Printed Editions of the Talmud 1992, p.147.

Avodah Zarah 8 ~ 2,000 Pages Done!

Page eight of Avodah Zarah, is the 2,000th page of the Talmud.  There are only 711 pages left until the completion of this Daf Yomi cycle. We commemorated 1,000 pages learned back in April 2015. Now let's do the same for this new milestone.

Pagination in Manuscripts of the Talmud

“The first complete edition of the Babylonian Talmud, the edito princeps, was printed from 1519/20-23. The Bomberg Talmud became a standard for the editions that followed, almost all subsequent editions adhered to his layout and foliation.”

— Marvin Heller. Earliest Printings of the Talmud. In Mintz and Goldstein. Printing the Talmud 2002. p 73

It should be noted that counting  Avodah Zarah 8 as the 2,000th page of the Talmud is a fairly recent development. By which we mean it has only been around since the saintly Daniel Bomberg and his 1519 edition.  Here, for example, is a page showing tomorrow's daf, from the handwritten manuscript found in the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris.  It was completed in 1337. (Avodah Zarah 8 begins with the second word on the second line.) The pagination and layout is entirely different to the standard format of the Talmud we are used to seeing.

Avodah Zarah 7b-8a. Circa 14-15 century. From Paris, Bibliotheque Nationale. Suppl. Heb 1337.

Visualizing 2,000 pages

1 Back on August 3, 2012 we opened the new cycle of Daf Yomi with Berachot 2. That day just happened to be ט׳ו באב.

10 pages looks like this:

100 looks like this

1,000 pages looks like this. We reached the 1,000th page of Talmud on April 29th, 2015.

And here are 2,000 pages, represented as dots:

Fun Facts about 2,000

The last big deal we made out of two-thousand was Y2K, the year our secular calendar tiptoed into the twenty-first century.  But 2,000 is an interesting number in itself. Like all numbers, it can be written as the sum of two primes: 2 × 2 × 2 × 2 × 5 × 5 × 5=2,000. It is a Harshad number, which is to say, it is an integer that is divisible by the sum of its digits.  

2,000 seconds is equal to 33 minutes, 20 seconds. To count from 1 to 2,000 would take you about thirty-three minutes. And a cube with a volume of 2000 cubic inches would be around 1 feet tall.

Alpayim (אלפיים, lit. "2,000") was also the name of a literary magazine published in Israel between 1989 and 2009. You can see a picture of one of its covers above.

2,000 in the תנ׳ך

The number 2,000 in the Hebrew Bible, the תנ’ך, appears in a number of places.

1. In the Book of Joshua, the people are warned to stay at least 2,000 cubits away from the Ark which they are following.

יהושע 3:4

אַ֣ךְ ׀ רָח֣וֹק יִהְיֶ֗ה בֵּֽינֵיכֶם֙ ובינו [וּבֵינָ֔יו] כְּאַלְפַּ֥יִם אַמָּ֖ה בַּמִּדָּ֑ה אַֽל־תִּקְרְב֣וּ אֵלָ֗יו לְמַ֤עַן אֲשֶׁר־תֵּֽדְעוּ֙ אֶת־הַדֶּ֙רֶךְ֙ אֲשֶׁ֣ר תֵּֽלְכוּ־בָ֔הּ כִּ֣י לֹ֧א עֲבַרְתֶּ֛ם בַּדֶּ֖רֶךְ מִתְּמ֥וֹל שִׁלְשֽׁוֹם׃ 

but keep a distance of some 2,000 cubits from it, never coming any closer to it—so that you may know by what route to march, since it is a road you have not traveled before.

2. In the sad story of the פלגש בגבעה, there is a civil war. Thousands die and a note is made of 2,000 killed, in addition to the other deaths. 

שופטים 20:45

וַיִּפְנ֞וּ וַיָּנֻ֤סוּ הַמִּדְבָּ֙רָה֙ אֶל־סֶ֣לַע הָֽרִמּ֔וֹן וַיְעֹֽלְלֻ֙הוּ֙ בַּֽמְסִלּ֔וֹת חֲמֵ֥שֶׁת אֲלָפִ֖ים אִ֑ישׁ וַיַּדְבִּ֤יקוּ אַחֲרָיו֙ עַד־גִּדְעֹ֔ם וַיַּכּ֥וּ מִמֶּ֖נּוּ אַלְפַּ֥יִם אִֽישׁ׃

They turned and fled to the wilderness, to the Rock of Rimmon; but [the Israelites] picked off another 5,000 on the roads and, continuing in hot pursuit of them up to Gidom, they slew 2,000 more.

3. King Solomon took thirteen years to complete the building of the first Temple. Among its contents was a large circular metal tub that sat on twelve statues of oxen.  It held the volume of 2,000 baths.

מלאכים א, 7:26

וְעָבְי֣וֹ טֶ֔פַח וּשְׂפָת֛וֹ כְּמַעֲשֵׂ֥ה שְׂפַת־כּ֖וֹס פֶּ֣רַח שׁוֹשָׁ֑ן אַלְפַּ֥יִם בַּ֖ת יָכִֽיל׃

It was a handbreadth thick, and its brim was made like that of a cup, like the petals of a lily. Its capacity was 2,000 baths.

4. In the war between the Israelite King Hezekiah and the Assyrian King Shalmaneser of Assyria, Hezekiah is taunted by the Assyrian leader:

מלאכים ב, 18:23

וְעַתָּה֙ הִתְעָ֣רֶב נָ֔א אֶת־אֲדֹנִ֖י אֶת־מֶ֣לֶךְ אַשּׁ֑וּר וְאֶתְּנָ֤ה לְךָ֙ אַלְפַּ֣יִם סוּסִ֔ים אִם־תּוּכַ֕ל לָ֥תֶת לְךָ֖ רֹכְבִ֥ים עֲלֵיהֶֽם׃

Come now, make this wager with my master, the king of Assyria: I’ll give you 2,000 horses if you can produce riders to mount them.

5. Among the donations made to rebuild the Temple during Nechemia's rein was a collective donation of 2,000 pieces of silver.

נחמיה 7:71

וַאֲשֶׁ֣ר נָתְנוּ֮ שְׁאֵרִ֣ית הָעָם֒ זָהָ֗ב דַּרְכְּמוֹנִים֙ שְׁתֵּ֣י רִבּ֔וֹא וְכֶ֖סֶף מָנִ֣ים אַלְפָּ֑יִם וְכָתְנֹ֥ת כֹּֽהֲנִ֖ים שִׁשִּׁ֥ים וְשִׁבְעָֽה׃ 

The rest of the people donated: gold—20,000 drachmas, silver—2,000, and 67 priestly robes.

6. In the Book of Chronicles, we are reminded of a battle in which tribes of Reuven, Gad and (half of) Menashe prevailed against the Hagarites. Here is what they plundered:

דברי הימים א, 5:21

וַיִּשְׁבּ֣וּ מִקְנֵיהֶ֗ם גְּֽמַלֵּיהֶ֞ם חֲמִשִּׁ֥ים אֶ֙לֶף֙ וְצֹ֗אן מָאתַ֤יִם וַחֲמִשִּׁים֙ אֶ֔לֶף וַחֲמוֹרִ֖ים אַלְפָּ֑יִם וְנֶ֥פֶשׁ אָדָ֖ם מֵ֥אָה אָֽלֶף׃

They carried off their livestock: 50,000 of their camels, 250,000 sheep, 2,000 asses, and 100,000 people.

All of this suggests that the number 2,000 might not need be read literally. It seems to mean instead "a really big number."

2,000 in the Talmud – and in Avoda Zarah

Perhaps the most famous use of the number 2,000 in the Talmud is the distance beyond which a person may not travel on Shabbat.

עירובין נא, א

׳הני אלפים אמה היכן כתיבן דתניא ׳שבו איש תחתיו׳ אלו ארבע אמות ׳אל יצא איש ממקומו אלו אלפים אמה

These two thousand cubits, where are they written in the Torah? It was taught in a baraita: “Every man shall remain in his place” (Exodus 16:29); these are the four cubits, [which constitute the minimum Shabbat limit for one who ventured beyond his prescribed limit]. “Let no man go out of his place”(Exodus 16:29); these are the 2,000 cubits of the Shabbat limit for one who remains in his place.

On today's 2,000th page, the number 2,000 makes a cameo appearance where it can be found in Rashi explaining the word תחום:

תחום. אלפים אמה סביבות העיר

The boundary: this is 2,000 cubits around the city

Unfortunately, a really interesting appearance of the number 2,000 comes the day after reaching our important milestone.  On Avodah Zarah 9a we learn that that the number 2,000 is part of a critical eschatological calculation:

עבודה זרה ט, א

תנא דבי אליהו ששת אלפים שנה הוי העולם שני אלפים תוהו שני אלפים תורה שני אלפים ימות המשיח

The school of Eliyahu taught: The world is destined to exist for six thousand years. For 2,000 years the world was waste, as the Torah had not yet been given. The next set of 2,000 years are the time period of the Torah. The last set of 2,000 years are the period designated for the days of the Messiah.

Too bad that discussion didn't come a page earlier. That would have made for a wonderful coincidence.  Ah well. Congratulations to all those who have travelled this far.  And welcome aboard to all those whose journey is just starting. 

Ketuvot 86 ~ 1,000 pages, and Counting

Tomorrow we will study the 1,000th page of Talmud in the current Daf Yomi cycle.  That's right, Ketuvot 86 is the 1,000th page. Here's how:

 64=ברכות 

 157=שבת

105=עירובין

121=פסחים

22=שקלים

88=יומא

56=סוכה

40=ביצה

35=ראש השנה

31=תענית

32=מגילה

29=מועד קטן

27=חגיגה

122=יבמות

86=כתובות

Add that all up and you get...1,015. Whoops? Not really. As you may recall, each new מסכת (tractate) of the Talmud has a title page, but the text always starts on page 2 (ב). So we need to subtract one page for each of the 15 tractates we've covered so far. And 1,015-15=1,000.

Pagination in the Talmud

It wasn't always the case that Ketuvot 86 meant the same thing to all readers. Before the printed Talmud, everything was written by hand, and your particular manuscript (if you were lucky enough to have one) might well differ from that in another town.  Here, for example, is the opening of the ninth chapter of Ketuvot, (the one we are currently studying in this Daf Yomi cycle,) in the 1342 manuscript held in the Munich State Library (Babylonischer Talmud – BSB Cod. heb. 95. 1342.) You'll notice how completely different it looks from anything we have today:

Opening of Ketuvot Chapter 9 (=83a), Babylonischer Talmud – BSB Cod. heb. 95. 1342

According to Marvin Heller (who knows everything about early Hebrew printing and the printing of the Talmud) it was Daniel Bomberg, a Christian printer who lived in Venice, who established the form of the Talmud that we have today.

“The first complete edition of the Babylonian Talmud, the edito princeps, was printed from 1519/20-23. The Bomberg Talmud became a standard for the editions that followed, almost all subsequent editions adhered to his layout and foliation.”

— Marvin Heller. Earliest Printings of the Talmud. In Mintz and Goldstein. Printing the Talmud 2002. p 73.

Bomberg printed the tractate Ketuvot in 1521, and so that is the earliest date we would recognize where we are now- Ketuvot 86, the 1,000th page of the Talmud. 

Some Light Summer Reading Suggestions

There are many novels with 1,000 pages of more. Perhaps you've read JRR Tolkien's Lord of the Rings Trilogy,  or Tolstoy's War and Peace?  What about Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, or Victor Hugo's Les Miserables, (only 1,504 pages, in paperback!) None of them appeal to you? Want something a bit more biblical? Then try Thomas Mann's Joseph and His Brothers, a retelling of a few chapters of Genesis...in 1,400 plus pages. (It must be good - he won a Nobel Prize.) Too high-brow? Then consider Stephen Kings's It (only 1,104 pages) Too scary? Then go for Charles Dicken's classic Bleak House; it's a story about the injustices of the British legal system, and the Penguin Classic edition is 1,096 pages long. Perfect beach reading.  

“I looked up War and Peace and it’s about this guy Pierre who fights in France, and all this terrible stuff happens to him, but in the end because of his charm he gets to be with this girl he really loves, and who really loves him even though she cheated on him.”

— Gary Shtenygart, Super Sad True Love Story

Visualizing Numbers

1

​Back on August 3, 2012 we opened the new cycle of Daf Yomi with Berachot 2. That day just happened to be ט׳ו באב.

10

Ten. It's no big deal really, other than we count using base 10 because that's how many fingers we have. We learned the tenth page of  the Talmud (Berachot 11) on August 12, 2012.

Ten is actually of great importance in Judiasm. Here are some of the significant ones:

• There were Ten Plagues in Egypt

• There were Ten Commandments. 

• The Torah (Deut. 26:12) commands that the poor be given one-tenth of our produce: כי תכלה לעשר את כל מעשר תבואתך בשנה השלישת שנת המעשר 

• We observe the annual Ten Days of Repentance from ראש השנה to יום כפור.

• There were Ten Martyrs that are rememberer in Jewish prayers on יום כפור.

• There are said to be Ten Lost Tribes of Israel.

• There are Ten Sephirot in the Kabbalah.

• Ten men are needed to make a minyan.

100

We studied the 100th page on Nov 10, 2012. That was Shabbat 38.  100 is of a special number, it being the square of 10. 

We make a big deal out of 100. It's the basis of our percentage calculations, and we count centuries based on their 100 year cycles. 100 is also the sum of the cubes of the first four integers: 100=[1x1x1]+[2x2x2]+[3x3x3]+[4x4x4].

Rabbi Meir taught that  a person should make 100 ברכות every day ( מנחות דף מג, ב). A person should hear 100 notes blown on the שופר on ראש השנה.

1,000

“1,000 is also a huge deal in our world and has a bunch of nicknames, like a grand, a G, a kilo, and k. It’s also part of the elite chain of numbers in the “order-of-magnitude” chain, which we know as million, billion, trillion, etc. Million is actually the third number in that chain, with the dud 1 as the first number and 1,000 as the second number. And 1,000 is the key multiplier that defines the whole chain.
That said, 1,000’s dirty secret is that it’s a fraud like 10 and can’t be made into a square. The square root of 1,000 is an embarrassing 31.62277660168 etcetera without even a vinculum”

— Tim Urban. From 1 to 1,000. Waitbutwhy.com

So we’ve covered 1,000 pages of the Babylonian Talmud. There are 2,711 pages in all, so we’re not even half-way done. But we’re closer than we were yesterday, and we will be even closer tomorrow. Congratulations to all who've reached this milestone.

Bomberg Talmud Ketuvot, title page 1521. From Marvin Heller, Printing the Talmud; A History of the Earliest Printed Editions of the Talmud 1992, p.147.