Looks Like We Made It!

As astute readers who have followed Talmudology since its inception will have already noted, last week we reached an incredible milestone. The last post, on Yevamot 42, was not just another day in the life of Talmudology. Because, seven and a half years ago, on November 15, 2014, an earlier version of that post was the very first one published on Talmudology. That’s right. It means that we have now completed Talmudology on the entire Babylonian Talmud.

Over the last seven and a half years Talmudology has published about 320 original essays, several of which were re-posted when the Talmud repeated itself. Over those years, this website has had over 221,000 unique visitors, and over 390,000 page views. That’s a lot of Talmudology.

What’s Next for Talmduology?

We will continue to re-publish our posts following the one-page-a-day Daf Yomi cycle. If you teach Daf Yomi, you can navigate to our Topics by Tractate section, and see what is available for each page before it comes up.

In addition, we will put out new material whenever the occasion calls for it. For example we never addressed the topic of weird and outlandish cases in the Talmud, so that will be remedied with a brand-new post on Yevamot 54. In addition to adding material we managed to skip the first time, the existing posts will be updated whenever necessary, because while the Talmud doesn’t change, science sometimes does.

We also hope to publish Talmudology in a two (to perhaps three) volume work, making it accessible on Shabbat, and available as a gift for your favorite Bar or Bat Mitzvah. This is an exciting (if daunting) project, and we are in discussion with a major publisher, so stay tuned…

Over the last seven and a half years, a lot has happened. I danced at the weddings of three of my children, and celebrated the birth of four grandchildren. I travelled widely, mourned the loss of a parent, underwent heart surgery, and watched with great pride as my wife took on a new position at Yeshiva University. In other words, life. Throughout it all I had Talmudology to keep me out of mischief; it was, and still is, a joy to produce.

Thank you to the many readers who pointed out errors of fact or grammar, and who made suggestions to improve the posts and sent fascinating material to help me do so. You have made Talmudology better, and your letters of support have brought many a smile to my face.

חזק ונתחזק

Jeremy

Talmudology Bonus: The Most Common Words in the Talmud

Some 62 days ago we began a new cycle of learning with the opening of the very first tractate of the Talmud, called Berachot. At that time we discussed how many words there are in the Babylonian Talmud. As you may recall, thanks to our friends at Sefaria, the answer was 1,860,131.

Tomorrow we will close the study of Berachot, and as a parting gift we share the wonderful work of Moshe Margulies of Silver Spring Maryland. I was lucky enough to hear Moshe present his findings at a local Siyyum Hashas in early January, and he kindly agreed to share them with you, our dear Talmudology reader. His question was this: What are the most common words and names in our beloved Babylonian Talmud?

First some methodology: He downloaded the PDF files of every tractate of the Talmud from here. Then he used a word count generator, (but only looked at the top 2500 words in each tractate.) And finally, he copied the counts into Excel, and performed the analysis in Tableau.

The most common word in the Talmud is…

“He said”. אמר. Of course it is. Because the Talmud is a written record of centuries of oral debate. Mostly by men (hence the “he said”), but sometimes by women. Here are the top 50 word frequencies in the Babylonian Talmud. It is interesting to learn though, of the second most frequent word: “No.” More on that later.

As Moshe pointed out, what is is striking is the big the gap is between the most frequent word, which is mentioned more than 35,000 times and the 25th word, which is mentioned a mere 6,000 times.  “Without knowing anything about the Gemera, this tells us what it is focused on.  Telling us things. Saying over what other people have said. Tradition.”  

And the most common name is…

“Rav” and “Rebbi” are at the top, which isn’t much of a surprise, since they are both the monikers of two specific talmudic rabbis, and are also used as a general honorific, much like Professor is used within universities. But Yehuda wins the award for being the most frequently mentioned name.  

Rava and Abaya are two of the most commonly cited pair of rabbis who sparred against each other. Although they always seem to be mentioned together, this analysis discovered that Rava is the 5th most common name and Abaya is the 9th most common name.  Weird, no?

Also note the gap between the top name, Rav – which is listed nearly 18,000 times, and fifteenth placed Yosef – which is listed a mere 1,900 times.

Continuing with the theme of famous sparring rabbis, Shamai is listed nearly 40% more times than Hillel, even though the Talmud almost always rules in favor of Hillel. Who knew?

The Longest word in the Talmud

Can you guess? It is….מדאורייתא “from the Torah.” At least it is the longest of any word that appears in the top 2500 most common words. Please let us know if you find a longer one.

Which is more likely? Permitted or forbidden?

We will end this fascinating analysis with this question: is the Talmud more likely to “permit” or to “forbid”? The answer seems to vary by tractate and which precise word you are using, but overall assur - “forbidden” beats mutar - “permitted” and is listed 300 more times.

You can find the dataset and results of Moshe’s analysis at Tableau, where you can also do an analysis of your own. In fact, if you are sitting alone with nothing to do in quarantine, this might be a useful way to pass the time.

Shabbat Shalom, and Stay Safe, from Talmudology.

Berachot 2 ~ How Many Words Are In the Babylonian Talmud?

We love to count. Along with the ABCs, counting is a skill we teach children as soon as we can.  The rabbis loved to count too.  In fact, the Talmud itself notes that the rabbis were called soferim because the word means “one who counts.”  This counting was taken very seriously, and when a question arose as to which letter was the midpoint of the Torah, the Talmud records that the rabbis “did not move from there until they brought a Torah scroll and counted all its letters." Today marks the start of the one-page-a-day study of the Babylonian Talmud, a seven-and-a-half-year journey that will end in June 2027.  We will read 2,711 double-sided pages, one each day, every day. But how many words is that? 

Before the advent digital texts, the number of words in the Babylonian Talmud could only be guesstimated. In the 1990s the late great American scholar of Talmud Yaakov Elman tried to do just that, using a method borrowed from the publishing industry called “casting.” Before it was possible to just click “word count” on the computer, publishers would count the average number of words on a line, count the average number of lines on a page, and then multiply by the number of pages in the book. Elman applied this methodology to the oldest known complete manuscript of the Talmud, known as Munich Codex.  He counted an average of 26 words on a line, an average of 80 lines on a page and a manuscript that was 990 pages long, for a grand total of 2,059,200 words.  

But Elman wasn’t quite done. He deducted 25% since the text of the Mishnah within the manuscript was larger than that of the Talmud itself, and another 3-4% for paragraph and chapter indentations. That left 1,452,440 words in the Babylonian Talmud. 

How accurate was Professor Elman’s estimate? In 1999 he had written that “despite several projects that have put the text of the Bavli [the Babylonian Talmud] on CD, figures like this are unfortunately not available, at least according to the computer experts associated with these projects.” But that was over two decades ago, and it was time to try the computer experts again. I turned to Dr Sara Wolkenfeld, Director of Education and Community Engagement for the Sefaria project. Sefaria was founded in 2011 by best-selling author Joshua Foer and Google alum Brett Lockspeiser, and now contains over 183 million words of online Jewish texts, among which is the Babylonian Talmud.  Wolkenfeld herself was finishing her own study of the entire Talmud, and intrigued, got her computer programmers on it. It took them “eight minutes of work and fifteen lines of code” to come up with the answer: 1,860,131 words. That’s about 28% greater than Elman’s guesstimate, and over twice as many words as Shakespeare left us. (But not as many as Winston Churchill wrote. His Complete Speeches totals over 5 million words.) 

“It took eight minutes of work and fifteen lines of code to come up with the answer: 1,860,131 words”

But even this count is not exact. There are different editions of the Talmud and they vary slightly in whether they spell out abbreviations. Still, it’s as close as we will ever get to an official count. And today we begin with the first letter of the first page of the Talmud, and a brand-new cycle of study.

The Final Page of Talmud: The Main Dish and the Appetizers

Tomorrow we will study the final page of the Babylonian Talmud. For those who have been following the Daf Yomi cycle, tomorrow represents the finish line of a marathon that began seven and a half years and 2, 711 pages ago. Congratulations to each of you who finished.

Since Talmudology is a project that connects modern science and medicine with the ancient teachings of the Talmud, it seems appropriate to reflect on the words of Rabbi Abraham ben Solomon of Hamburg. He wrote on this very subject when he made his own siyyum (celebratory party) on the completion of learning the Talmud in London some time before 1781 (although the precise date is not known). His essay appeared in a small book he published called Oleh Terufah (Leaf of Healing), in which he called for Jews to adopt the smallpox vaccine.

We have written about this book elsewhere. Its contents have become tragically germane in the anti-vaccination hysteria that gripped parts of the Jewish community. But for now, we can leave that part of the book, and focus on the words of Torah that Abraham delivered in London at his own Siyyum HaShas over two centuries ago. What follows is a free summary of some of his words.

משנה אבות ג, יח

רַבִּי אֱלִיעֶזֶר בֶּן חִסְמָא אוֹמֵר, קִנִּין וּפִתְחֵי נִדָּה, הֵן הֵן גּוּפֵי הֲלָכוֹת. תְּקוּפוֹת וְגִימַטְרִיאוֹת, פַּרְפְּרָאוֹת לַחָכְמָה

Rabbi Eliezer ben Hisma said: the laws of mixed bird offerings and the key to the calculations of menstruation days are the body of the halakhah. The calculation of the equinoxes and celestial geometry are the appetizers of wisdom.

There are many areas of Jewish law that depend on mastery of the sciences, especially mathematics and physics. These are needed to calculate the sun’s orbit and to keep the Jewish calendar synchronized with the solar year, so that Pesach always falls in the Spring, and Sukkot always falls during the Fall harvest.  The rules of “mixed birds nests” and the calculations of the days of ritual menstrual impurity follow certain mathematical principles, and these in turn rely - to a degree - on an understanding of mathematics. Without that understanding it is possible to err in the calculations, and this might lead to sin.

 משנה ברכות מב,א

בֵּרַךְ עַל הַפַּת פָּטַר אֶת הַפַּרְפֶּרֶת עַל הַפַּרְפֶּרֶת לֹא פָּטַר אֶת הַפַּת  

…One who recited a blessing over the bread exempted the appetizers, as they are considered secondary to the bread. However, one who recited a blessing over the appetizers did not exempt the bread.

In a few weeks we will study a Mishnah which teaches that a blessing made over bread includes the appetizers, in so far as these then do not need a blessing of their own before being eaten. But a blessing made before eating an appetizer does not exempt a blessing to be made over bread. It is the presence of bread that trumps the other foods.

Rabbi Abraham ben Solomon of Hamburg noted that the word “parperet” (פַּרְפֶּרֶת) is used to describe the sciences (‘The calculation of the equinoxes and celestial geometry are the appetizers of wisdom”) as well as the food we today call an appetizer. The Torah is the bread of a meal. Just as bread supersedes the presence of an appetizer, so too the Torah has pride of place over the sciences.  

This is the homiletic meaning of the Mishnah: “If you make a blessing over the bread you have exempted the appetizers.”  While the sciences are important, they are merely the appetizers. Pride of place must always be given to the bread - the Torah.

תם ונשלם מסכת נדה ותלמוד בבלי

וברוך נותן חכמה לבני אדם

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Next time on Talmudology: How Many words are there in the Talmud?