This aggadic sugya in Perek Chelek in tractate Sanhedrin examines two biblical communities condemned for their collective wrongdoing: the Generation of the Dispersion (דור הפלגה), associated with the Tower of Babel, and the inhabitants of Sodom. Both appear in the Mishnah’s list of groups excluded from the World-to-Come. The Talmud investigates the nature of their sins, the reasons for their punishment, and the biblical evidence supporting these judgments.

The discussion draws primarily on Genesis 11, concerning the Tower of Babel, and Genesis 13 and 19, concerning Sodom. It also makes extensive use of other biblical passages, particularly Job, Psalms, Exodus, and Deuteronomy. Through scriptural interpretation, the rabbis develop accounts of the two societies’ behavior that go considerably beyond the information explicitly supplied by Genesis.

1. The Generation of the Dispersion and the Tower of Babel

The first part begins with the Mishnah’s declaration that the Generation of the Dispersion has no share in the World-to-Come. The Talmud asks what these people actually did to deserve such a severe punishment. Genesis 11:1–9 describes humanity’s construction of a city and tower, God’s intervention to confuse their language, and their subsequent dispersion across the earth. However, the narrative does not explicitly identify their precise offense.

The school of R’ Sheila proposes that the builders intended to ascend to heaven and strike the sky with axes, causing its waters to flow down. This explanation imagines the tower as a means of physically accessing and manipulating the heavens. The rabbis of Eretz Yisrael ridicule this interpretation on geographical grounds: if the builders wanted to reach heaven, they should have constructed their tower on a mountain rather than in the Mesopotamian valley described in Genesis 11:2.

R’ Yirmeya bar Elazar offers a more elaborate account, dividing the builders into three factions, each with a distinct objective and punishment. The first faction wished to ascend to heaven and establish its residence there. Its members were punished by being dispersed across the earth. The second intended to ascend and wage war. Its members were transformed into apes, spirits, demons, and liliths (a category of female demons). The third faction intended to ascend for the purpose of idol worship. Its punishment was the confusion of human language, as described in Genesis 11:9.

R’ Natan disagrees with the division of motives, maintaining that all three factions intended to engage in idolatry. His interpretation rests on a verbal analogy between two biblical passages. Genesis 11:4 records the builders’ declaration, “Let us make a name for ourselves.” Exodus 23:13 prohibits mentioning the “name” of other gods. Since the latter passage concerns idolatry, R’ Natan interprets the reference to making a “name” in Genesis as similarly referring to idol worship.

The discussion then turns from the builders’ intentions to the physical fate of the tower and its surroundings. According to R’ Yoḥanan, one-third of the tower was burned, one-third was swallowed by the earth, and one-third remained standing. This tradition presents the tower as a structure whose destruction was incomplete, leaving visible ruins.

Rav adds that the atmosphere surrounding the tower causes forgetfulness, specifically the loss of previously acquired learning. Rav Yosef extends this association to Babylonia and nearby Borsippa, describing both places as unfavorable for Torah study. Finally, R’ Asi interprets the name Borsippa (בורסיף) as a contraction of bor shafi, meaning “empty pit.”

These statements connect the biblical story of linguistic confusion with the later theme of intellectual forgetfulness. They also locate the effects of the ancient event within the geography of Babylonia.

2. The Sins and Punishment of Sodom

The second part addresses the Mishnah’s declaration that the people of Sodom likewise have no share in the World-to-Come. A baraita derives this punishment from Genesis 13:13, which describes the inhabitants of Sodom as “wicked and sinners before YHWH exceedingly.” It interprets “wicked” as referring to punishment in this world and “sinners” as referring to punishment in the World-to-Come.

The Talmud then analyzes the individual words of this verse to identify the specific categories of wrongdoing attributed to Sodom. Rav Yehuda interprets “wicked” as referring to bodily sins and “sinners” as referring to financial wrongdoing. He supports these readings with Genesis 39:9, where Joseph describes adultery with Potiphar’s wife as a great wickedness, and Deuteronomy 15:9, where refusing assistance to the poor is described as a sin. He further interprets “before YHWH” as referring to blasphemy and “exceedingly” as indicating deliberate wrongdoing.

A baraita presents an alternative arrangement. It reverses the first two interpretations, associating “wicked” with financial offenses and “sinners” with bodily offenses. It agrees that “before YHWH” refers to blasphemy but interprets “exceedingly” as referring specifically to murder, based on the description of King Manasseh’s extensive bloodshed in II Kings 21:16.

Both interpretations portray Sodom’s wickedness as encompassing multiple categories of offenses, including sexual or bodily misconduct, economic wrongdoing, and offenses against God. The disagreement concerns how the individual words of Genesis 13:13 correspond to these categories.

The discussion next develops an explanation for the origins of Sodom’s wrongdoing. A baraita states that the inhabitants became arrogant because of the extraordinary prosperity God had bestowed upon them. Their land produced abundant food and possessed valuable natural resources, including precious stones and gold. The Talmud describes this prosperity through an interpretation of Job 28:5–8, a passage depicting the earth’s hidden mineral wealth.

The inhabitants of Sodom consequently regarded outsiders as an economic burden. Since their land already supplied everything they needed, they saw no reason to accommodate travelers who might consume their resources. They therefore resolved to eliminate the practice of hospitality toward travelers from their territory. The Talmud connects this policy with Job 28:4, interpreting its description of a place forgotten by pedestrians as an allusion to Sodom’s exclusion of outsiders.

The sugya then supplies concrete examples of the Sodomites’ criminal behavior, particularly their systematic exploitation of wealthy individuals. Rava describes a practice in which the inhabitants targeted property owners, seated them beside unstable walls, and deliberately collapsed the walls upon them. After killing their victims, they appropriated their possessions. This account is derived from Psalms 62:4, which refers to attacking a person like a leaning wall or tottering fence.

Rava describes another method involving fragrant balsam. The Sodomites would deposit balsam with a wealthy individual, who would place it in his treasury. At night, the thieves would follow the distinctive scent to locate the hidden valuables, break into the building, and steal them.

This account combines Job 24:16, describing burglars digging through houses in darkness, with Psalms 59:7, which compares prowling figures to dogs roaming a city at night.

The sugya concludes with additional citations from Job describing the mistreatment of vulnerable individuals and violations of property rights. These include depriving people of clothing, seizing an orphan’s donkey, taking a widow’s ox as collateral, moving boundary markers, stealing livestock, and conduct associated with burial.

The Talmud applies these biblical descriptions to Sodom, expanding its characterization from a society hostile to travelers into one marked by theft, murder, exploitation of the vulnerable, and disregard for basic social obligations.

Outline

Intro

The Passage

Part 1 - The Generation of the Dispersion and the Tower of Babel

1. Mishnah - The Generation of the Dispersion (Tower of Babel) has no share in the World-to-Come

2. R’ Sheila’s School - The builders of the Generation of the Dispersion (Tower of Babel) intended to ascend to heaven (via the tower) and strike the sky with axes to release its waters

3. Rabbis of Eretz Yisrael - Reject the preceding explanation: If their goal was to reach heaven, they should have built the tower on a mountain (rather than in the Mesopotamian valley) - Genesis 11:2

4. R’ Yirmeya bar Elazar - The builders divided into three factions: (1) Those wishing to reside in heaven were dispersed; (2) those wishing to wage war became apes, spirits, demons, and liliths; (3) those wishing to worship idols had their language confused - Genesis 11:9

5. R’ Natan - All three factions intended idolatry

   1. Prooftext - The word “name” in the Babel narrative is interpreted as referring to idolatry, based on its use elsewhere - Genesis 11:4; Exodus 23:13

6. R’ Yoḥanan - One-third of the tower was burned, one-third swallowed by the earth, and one-third remained standing

7. Rav - The atmosphere surrounding the ruins of the Tower of Babel causes people to forget their learning

8. Rav Yosef - Babylonia and Borsippa are unfavorable places for Torah study (because they cause forgetfulness)

9. R’ Asi - The name ‘Bursif’ (=Borsippa) means “empty pit” (bor shafi)

Part 2 - The Sins and Punishment of Sodom

1. Mishnah - The people of Sodom have no share in the World-to-Come

2. Baraita - The description of Sodom’s inhabitants as “wicked and sinners” indicates punishment in both this world and the World-to-Come - Genesis 13:13

3. Rav Yehuda - Interprets Sodom’s sins: “wicked” refers to bodily sins; “sinners” to financial sins; “before YHWH” to blasphemy; and “exceedingly” to deliberate wrongdoing - Genesis 13:13, 39:9; Deuteronomy 15:9

4. Baraita - Reverses Rav Yehuda’s first two interpretations: “wicked” refers to financial sins and “sinners” to bodily sins; “Before YHWH” indicates blasphemy, while “exceedingly” indicates murder - Genesis 13:13, 39:9; Deuteronomy 15:9; II Kings 21:16

5. Baraita - Sodom’s prosperity and natural wealth led its inhabitants to arrogance and sin

   1. Prooftext - Job 28:5–8

6. Because their land supplied abundant food and wealth, Sodom’s inhabitants regarded travelers as economic burdens, and resolved to eliminate hospitality toward outsiders

   1. Prooftext - Job 28:4–5

7. Rava - Sodom’s inhabitants targeted wealthy individuals by seating them beside unstable walls, collapsing the walls upon them, and stealing their property - Psalms 62:4

8. Rava - The Sodomites deposited fragrant balsam with wealthy individuals, followed its scent at night to locate their treasuries, and broke in to steal their possessions - Job 24:16; Psalms 59:7

9. Additional biblical descriptions of Sodom’s practices, including deprivation of clothing, exploitation of orphans and widows, theft of livestock, and mistreatment associated with burial - Job 24:2-7, 21:32

The Passage

Sanhedrin/109a#4 thru #15

Part 1 - The Generation of the Dispersion and the Tower of Babel

Mishnah - The Generation of the Dispersion (Tower of Babel) has no share in the World-to-Come

דור הפלגה אין להם חלק לעולם הבא וכו׳.

מאי עבוד?

§ The Mishnah teaches that the members of the Generation of the Dispersion have no share in the World-to-Come.

The Talmud asks: What sin did they perform?

Their sin is not explicitly delineated in the Torah.

R’ Sheila’s School - The builders of the Generation of the Dispersion (Tower of Babel) intended to ascend to heaven (via the tower) and strike the sky with axes to release its waters

אמרי דבי רבי שילא:

נבנה מגדל

ונעלה לרקיע,

ונכה אותו בקרדומות

כדי שיזובו מימיו.

The school of R’ Sheila say that

the builders of the Tower of Babel said:

We will build a tower

and ascend to heaven,

and we will strike it with axes (קרדומות)

so that its waters will flow (יזובו)

Rabbis of Eretz Yisrael - Reject the preceding explanation: If their goal was to reach heaven, they should have built the tower on a mountain (rather than in the Mesopotamian valley) - Genesis 11:2

מחכו עלה במערבא:

אם כן,

ליבנו אחד טורא!

They laughed at this explanation in the West, Eretz Yisrael, and asked:

If that was their objective,

let them build a tower on a mountain;

why did they build it specifically in a valley (see Genesis 11:2)?

R’ Yirmeya bar Elazar - The builders divided into three factions: (1) Those wishing to reside in heaven were dispersed; (2) those wishing to wage war became apes, spirits, demons, and liliths; (3) those wishing to worship idols had their language confused - Genesis 11:9

(אלא) אמר רבי ירמיה בר אלעזר:

נחלקו לשלש כיתות:

1. אחת אומרת:

   1. נעלה ונשב שם,

2. ואחת אומרת:

   1. נעלה ונעבוד עבודה זרה,

3. ואחת אומרת:

   1. נעלה ונעשה מלחמה.

Rather, R’ Yirmeya bar Elazar says:

They divided into 3 factions (כיתות):

1. one said:

   1. Let us ascend to the top of the tower and reside there.

2. And one said:

   1. Let us ascend to the top of the tower and engage in idol worship.

3. And one said:

   1. Let us ascend to the top of the tower and wage war.

1. זו שאומרת נעלה ונשב שם ⁠–

   1. ״הפיצם ה׳״,

2. וזו שאומרת נעלה ונעשה מלחמה ⁠–

   1. נעשו

      1. קופים

      2. ורוחות

      3. ושידים

      4. ולילין,

3. וזו שאומרת נעלה ונעבוד עבודה זרה ⁠–

   1. ״כי שם בלל ה׳ שפת כל הארץ״.

1. With regard to that faction that said: Let us ascend to the top of the tower and reside there,

   1. God dispersed them.

2. And that faction that said: Let us ascend to the top of the tower and wage war,

   1. became

      1. apes,

      2. and spirits,

      3. and demons,

      4. and female demons2

3. And with regard to that faction that said: Let us ascend to the top of the tower and engage in idol worship,

   1. it is written: “Because there YHWH confounded the language of all the earth” (Genesis 11:9).

R’ Natan - All three factions intended idolatry

תניא,

רבי נתן אומר:

כולם לשם עבודה זרה נתכוונו.

It is taught in a baraita:

R’ Natan says:

All of those factions intended to build the tower for the sake of idol worship.

Prooftext - The word “name” in the Babel narrative is interpreted as referring to idolatry, based on its use elsewhere - Genesis 11:4; Exodus 23:13

• כתיב הכא:

  • ״נעשה לנו שם״,

• וכתיב התם:

  • ״ושם אלהים אחרים לא תזכירו״.

• מה להלן

  • עבודה זרה,

• אף כאן

  • עבודה זרה.

• It is written here:

  • “And let us make a name for us” (Genesis 11:4),

• and it is written there:

  • “And make no mention of the name of the other gods” (Exodus 23:13).

• Just as there,

  • the connotation of “name” is idol worship,

• so too here,

  • the connotation of “name” is idol worship.

R’ Yoḥanan - One-third of the tower was burned, one-third swallowed by the earth, and one-third remained standing

אמר רבי יוחנן:

מגדל —

1. שליש נשרף,

2. שליש נבלע,

3. שליש קיים.

R’ Yoḥanan says:

the tower —

1. The uppermost 1/3rd of the tower was burned,

2. the lowermost 1/3rd of the tower was swallowed into the earth,

3. and the middle 1/3rd remained intact3

Rav - The atmosphere surrounding the ruins of the Tower of Babel causes people to forget their learning

אמר רב:

אויר מגדל —

משכח.

Rav says:

The atmosphere4 of the tower —

causes forgetfulness5

Rav Yosef - Babylonia and Borsippa are unfavorable places for Torah study (because they cause forgetfulness)

אמר רב יוסף:

בבל ובורסיף --

סימן רע לתורה.

Rav Yosef says:

Babylonia and the adjacent place, Bursif (=Borsippa)--

are each a bad omen for Torah,

i.e., they cause one to forget his knowledge.

R’ Asi - The name ‘Bursif’ (=Borsippa) means “empty pit” (bor shafi)

מאי בורסיף?

אמר רבי אסי:

בור שאפי.

The Talmud asks: What is the meaning of Bursif?

R’ Asi says:

It is an abbreviation of empty pit [bor shafi].

R’ Abba’s Eulogy and the Shekhina: R’ Abba - Rav Huna was worthy of the Shekhina, but Babylonia prevented it

פתח עליה רבי אבא:

ראוי היה רבינו שתשרה עליו שכינה,

אלא שבבל גרמה לו.

R’ Abba opened his eulogy for [Rav Huna]:

Our rabbi [=Rav Huna] was worthy that the Shekhina should rest upon him,

except for the fact that Babylonia caused it not to rest.1

Rav Naḥman / Ḥanan bar Ḥisda - Challenge from Ezekiel’s prophecy in Babylonia

מתיב רב נחמן בר חסדא,

ואמרי לה רב חנן בר חסדא:

״היה היה דבר ה׳ אל יחזקאל בן בוזי הכהן

בארץ כשדים״

Rav Naḥman bar Ḥisda raised an objection against this,

and some say that it was Rav Ḥanan bar Ḥisda:

Is it not stated:

“The word of YHWH came [hayo haya] to Ezekiel the priest, son of Buzi,

in the land of the Chaldeans” (Ezekiel 1:3)2

Father silences the challenger; explanation: Ezekiel first prophesied in Israel

טפח ליה אבוה בסנדליה,

אמר ליה:

לאו אמינא לך לא תיטרוד עלמא?!

מאי ״היה״ ?

שהיה כבר.

His father3 tapped (טפח) him with his sandal on his foot, thereby hinting to him that he should be quiet.

He said to him:

Have I not told you not to trouble everyone with questions in the middle of a eulogy?!

What is the meaning of the doubling of the word “came [hayo haya]”?

It implies that it had already come before4

Arrival in Eretz Yisrael: R’ Ami and R’ Asi mistakenly think Rav Huna is alive; recall their reverence for him

כי אסקוה להתם,

אמרו ליה לרבי אמי ולרבי אסי:

רב הונא אתי.

§ The Talmud relates that

when people took5 Rav Huna’s coffin there, to Eretz Yisrael, for burial

People said to R’ Ami and R’ Asi:

Rav Huna has come6

אמרו:

כי הוינן התם

לא הוה לן לדלויי רישין מיניה.

השתא אתינן הכא —

אתא בתרין?!

[R’ Ami and R’ Asi] said:

When we were there, in Babylonia,

we did not have strength to lift our heads before [Rav Huna].

Now that we have come here to Eretz Yisrael,

has [Rav Huna] come after us?!

People clarify: Rav Huna’s coffin arrived in Eretz Yisrael; Some go out; some do not

אמרו ליה: ארונו בא.

• רבי אמי ורבי אסי נפוק,

• רבי אילא ורבי חנינא לא נפוק.

איכא דאמרי:

• רבי אילא נפק,

• רבי חנינא לא נפק.

People said to [R’ Ami and R’ Asi]: [Rav Huna’s] coffin has come.

• R’ Ami and R’ Asi went out to meet the funeral procession of Rav Huna’s coffin.

• R’ Ila and R’ Ḥanina did not go out.

Some say that

• R’ Ila went out,

• but R’ Ḥanina did not go out.

Two conflicting baraitot about whether people line up and recite blessings for a coffin traveling between places.

דנפק,

מאי טעמיה?

דתניא:

ארון העובר ממקום למקום —

עומדים עליו בשורה

ואומרים עליו

1. ברכת אבלים

2. ותנחומי אבלים.

The Talmud asks:

Those who went out,

what is the reason that they went?

As it is taught in a baraita:

When a coffin is passing from place to place —

the people stand in a line to show respect for the deceased,

and they recite

1. the mourners’ blessing

2. and the consolation of the mourners over it.

דלא נפק,

מאי טעמא?

דתניא:

ארון העובר ממקום למקום —

אין עומדין עליו בשורה

ואין אומרים עליו

1. ברכת אבלים

2. ותנחומי אבלים.

[...]

Those who did not go out,

what is the reason that they did not?

As it is taught in another baraita:

When a coffin is passing from place to place —

they do not stand in a line to show respect for the deceased,

and they do not recite

1. the mourners’ blessing

2. or the consolation of the mourners for him.

[...]

Burial Location: Decision to bury Rav Huna near R’ Ḥiyya, since both “disseminated Torah”

אמרי:

היכא נינחיה?

• רב הונא ריבץ תורה בישראל,

• ורבי חייא ריבץ תורה בישראל הוה.

People said:

Where shall we bury [Rav Huna]?

People concluded:

• Rav Huna disseminated Torah to the people of Israel,

• and similarly R’ Ḥiyya disseminated (ריבץ) Torah to the people of Israel;

therefore, it is appropriate to bury Rav Huna next to R’ Ḥiyya.

Who May Enter the Cave: Rav Ḥagga volunteers, citing his purity at age 18, long service to Rav Huna, and his knowledge of Rav Huna’s pious deeds (e.g., 40 fasts for a tefillin strap flipped)

מאן מעייל ליה?

אמר להו רב חגא:

אנא מעיילנא ליה,

דאוקמתיה לתלמודאי כי הוינא בר תמני סרי שנין

ולא חזי לי קרי,

ומשמע לי(ה) קמיה,

וידעי בעובדיה,

דיומא חד אתהפיכא ליה רצועה דתפילין

ויתיב עלה ארבעין תעניתא.

They asked: Who will take [Rav Huna’s body] in to R’ Ḥiyya’s burial cave, as few are fit to enter it?

Rav Ḥagga said to them:

I will take [Rav Huna’s body] into the cave,

for I presented my studies before Rav Huna when I was just 18 years old,

never having experienced a seminal emission (קרי - keri).

And so too I attended to him and knew his great deeds.

For example, one day one of the straps of his tefillin turned around, the unpainted side being turned outward,

and he observed 40 fasts for this,

as he had acted negligently, allowing the black side to face inward.

Inside the Cave: Encounter with Yehuda and Ḥizkiyya - Spirits/ corpses of R’ Ḥiyya’s sons respond to Rav Huna’s presence; Ḥizkiyya rises with a pillar of fire; Rav Ḥagga escapes unharmed by propping up the coffin

עייליה,

הוה גני

• יהודה מימיניה דאבוה

• וחזקיה משמאליה.

Rav Ḥagga took [Rav Huna’s body] in.

Laid (גני) buried

• the body of R’ Ḥiyya’s son Yehuda to the right of his father [=R’ Ḥiyya’s body],

• and the body of R’ Ḥiyya’s other son Ḥizkiyya lay to [R’ Ḥiyya’s body’s] left.

אמר ליה יהודה לחזקיה:

קום מדוכתיך!

דלאו אורח ארעא דקאים רב הונא.

The spirit of Yehuda said to the spirit of Ḥizkiyya:

Rise from your place!

as it is not proper conduct to remain lying when the body of Rav Huna is standing here.

בהדי דקאים —

קם בהדיה עמודא דנורא.

חזייה רב חגא,

איבעית,

זקפיה לארוניה

ונפק אתא.

When Ḥizkiyya’s corpse7 stood up,

a pillar of fire rose with him.

When R’ Ḥagga saw this,

he was frightened by what he saw,

and so he stood up Rav Huna’s coffin

and went away.

והאי דלא איענש (ענש),

משום דזקפיה לארוניה דרב הונא.

The Talmud comments:

And [R’ Ḥagga] was not punished or harmed by this pillar of fire

because he set up (זקפיה) Rav Huna’s coffin as protection for himself.

Rav Ḥisda’s Death: Torah Scroll Issue Reappears

They again propose placing a Torah scroll; R’ Yitzḥak objects: he did not approve this practice in life

כי נח נפשיה דרב חסדא,

סבור לאותובי ספר תורה אפורייה.

אמר להו רבי יצחק:

מילתא דלרביה לא סבירא ליה,

אנן ניקום נעביד ליה?!

§ The Talmud relates another story about the burial of one of the Babylonian rabbis:

When Rav Ḥisda died

people thought to place a Torah scroll on [Rav Ḥisda] bier.

R’ Yitzḥak said to them:

This is a practice that this rabbi [=Rav Ḥisda] did not hold with during his lifetime;

should we stand up and do it for him now that he is dead?!

They think they must not re-sew; R’ Yitzḥak bar Ami says: once they turn away from the bier, they may

סבור דלא למישלל קרעייהו.

אמר להו רבי יצחק בר אמי:

חכם,

כיון שהחזירו פניהם מאחורי המטה —

שוללין.

People then thought not to tack8 the rips that they had made in their clothes.

R’ Yitzḥak bar Ami said to them:

When the deceased is a sage (חכם),

once they turn their faces from the bier --

they may tack the tears

Rabba bar Huna and Rav Hamnuna

The two coffins on camels reach a single-file bridge; animals stop

כי נח נפשיה דרבה בר הונא ורב המנונא,

אסקונהו להתם.

כי מטו אגישרא,

קמו גמלי.

The Talmud relates that when Rabba bar Huna and Rav Hamnuna died,

People took them both up there, to Eretz Yisrael.

When they reached a bridge that could be crossed only in single file,

the camels carrying the two rabbis stood in their places and would not cross the bridge.

An Arab says the honor order requires Rabba bar Huna to go first; after saying this, his teeth fall out for disrespecting Rav Hamnuna

אמר להו ההוא טייעא: מאי האי?

אמרו ליה:

רבנן דקא עבדי יקרא אהדדי.

• מר אמר: מר ניעול ברישא,

• ומר אמר: מר ניעול ברישא.

אמר: דינא הוא דרבה בר הונא ליעול ברישא.

חליף גמליה דרבה בר הונא,

נתור ככיה ושניה דההוא טייעא.

A certain Arab [tayya’a] who witnessed what was happening said to them:

What is this phenomenon that the camels have stopped moving?

People said to [the Arab]:

The deceased rabbis are showing honor to each other.

It is as if

• one rabbi is saying: The Master should go and cross the bridge first,

• while at the same time the other rabbi is saying: The Master should go and cross first.

The Arab said: Logically (דינא), the coffin of Rabba bar Huna should go first, since he is the son of a great man (=Rav Huna),

and the camel carrying the coffin of Rabba bar Huna thus passed first.

Shortly thereafter, the molars (ככיה) and other teeth of that Arab fell out9

The sugya opens with a baraita addressing the question: “Why do a person’s sons and daughters die when they are young?” The baraita states that this occurs “so that he will cry and mourn over an upright person.” The sugya then turns to laws and images of keri‘a (tearing one’s clothing) at death. A second baraita records R’ Shimon ben Elazar’s teaching: One who stands over the deceased at the moment of the soul’s departure is obligated to rend, likened to the obligation to rend when a Torah scroll burns.

The sugya next treats the death of Rav Safra. The Sages do not rend garments, explaining that they “did not learn from him.” Abaye rebukes them: the baraita says “a Torah scholar has died”, not “one’s teacher.” Abaye adds that Rav Safra’s teachings are recited daily. When the Sages think the moment has passed, Abaye cites: As long as eulogies continue for a scholar, one is obligated to rend. When they attempt to rend immediately, he cites another baraita: A scholar’s honor is at his eulogy, so the rending must occur then.

The sugya then shifts to the death of Rav Huna. They wish to place a Torah scroll on his bier; Rav Ḥisda forbids it, as Rav Huna did not tolerate sitting on a bed with a scroll on it. Evidence is cited from Rav Taḥlifa, who saw Rav Huna invert a jug to lift a scroll off the bed before sitting. When the bier cannot pass through the doorway, they consider lowering it from the roof; Rav Ḥisda objects, citing Rav Huna’s teaching that a scholar’s honor is to exit through the door. They propose transferring the body to a narrower bier; Rav Ḥisda again objects, as a scholar must be taken out on the first bier. The prooftext is II Samuel 6:3 (“the Ark of God” on a “new cart”). Unable to do otherwise, they break the doorway and remove him properly.

In his eulogy, R’ Abba declares Rav Huna worthy of the Shekhina, except that “Babylonia caused it not to rest.” Rav Naḥman bar Ḥisda (or Rav Ḥanan bar Ḥisda) challenges from Ezekiel’s prophecy in Babylonia, but his father silences him. The doubling hayo haya indicates Ezekiel had already begun prophesying in Eretz Yisrael.

When Rav Huna is brought to Eretz Yisrael, the messengers announce “Rav Huna has come,” and R’ Ami and R’ Asi initially think he is alive, recalling their awe of him in Babylonia. Informed that his coffin has arrived, some Sages go out to meet it; others do not. Two baraitot yield opposite rulings on whether to stand in a line and recite birkat aveilim and tanchumei aveilim for a coffin traveling from place to place.

They decide to bury Rav Huna near R’ Ḥiyya, since both “disseminated Torah in Israel.” The question arises: Who may enter the burial cave? Rav Ḥagga volunteers, citing his purity at age eighteen (never having experienced keri), his long service to Rav Huna, and his knowledge of Rav Huna’s pious deeds—e.g., forty fasts for a tefillin strap that flipped. Inside, he encounters the bodies of Yehuda and Ḥizkiyya, R’ Ḥiyya’s sons, lying to the right and left of their father. Yehuda tells Ḥizkiyya to rise out of respect for Rav Huna; when Ḥizkiyya stands, a pillar of fire rises with him. Afraid, Rav Ḥagga props up Rav Huna’s coffin and exits. He is unharmed because he supported the coffin.

The pattern repeats at the death of Rav Ḥisda: they again propose placing a Torah scroll on the bier; R’ Yitzḥak objects, for Rav Ḥisda did not approve this practice in life. When the mourners hesitate to sew their torn garments, R’ Yitzḥak bar Ami rules that once they turn their faces from the bier, they may sew.

The sugya concludes with the deaths of Rabba bar Huna and Rav Hamnuna, whose coffins, carried on camels, reach a single-file bridge in Eretz Yisrael. The animals stop. It’s explained to an accompanying Arab that the Sages are showing honor to one another, each deferring to the other to cross first. The Arab decides that Rabba bar Huna should go first because he is the son of a great man; his camel then proceeds. For speaking in this manner and thereby slighting Rav Hamnuna, the Arab is divinely punished: his molars and teeth fall out.

Outline

Intro

The Passage

1. Baraita - why do a person’s young children die? to generate mourning for an “upright person”

2. R’ Shimon ben Elazar on Rending at Death - one who stands at the moment of death must rend garments, akin to a Torah scroll burning

Rav Safra’s Death and Keri‘a

1. Sages fail to rend garments since they “did not learn from him”; Abaye rebukes them: the baraita speaks of a “Torah scholar,” not “one’s teacher”; He notes that Rav Safra’s words are cited daily

2. Sages think it is too late to rend; Abaye cites a tannaitic rule that as long as eulogies continue, people remain obligated

3. They then want to rend immediately; Abaye says the scholar’s honor is at the eulogy

Rav Huna’s Funeral: Torah Scroll on the Bier

1. They wish to place a Torah scroll beside Rav Huna; Rav Ḥisda objects: Rav Huna avoided sitting on a bed with a scroll

2. Evidence from Rav Taḥlifa

3. Bier does not fit; they consider lowering from roof; Rav Ḥisda opposes: a scholar’s honor is to exit through the door

4. They consider transferring him to a smaller bier; Rav Ḥisda objects: a scholar must go out on the first bier

5. Prooftext from the Ark placed on a “new cart”(II Samuel 6:3); With no alternative, they break the doorway to maintain the honor constraints

6. R’ Abba’s Eulogy and the Shekhina: R’ Abba - Rav Huna was worthy of the Shekhina, but Babylonia prevented it

7. Rav Naḥman / Ḥanan bar Ḥisda - Challenge from Ezekiel’s prophecy in Babylonia

8. Father silences the challenger; explanation: Ezekiel first prophesied in Israel

9. Arrival in Eretz Yisrael: R’ Ami and R’ Asi mistakenly think Rav Huna is alive; recall their reverence for him

10. Clarification: only the coffin arrived; Some go out; some do not

11. Two conflicting baraitot about whether people line up and recite blessings for a coffin traveling between places.

12. Burial Location: Decision to bury Rav Huna near R’ Ḥiyya, since both “disseminated Torah”

13. Who May Enter the Cave: Rav Ḥagga volunteers, citing his purity at age 18, long service to Rav Huna, and his knowledge of Rav Huna’s pious deeds (e.g., 40 fasts for a tefillin strap flipped)

14. Inside the Cave: Encounter with Yehuda and Ḥizkiyya - Spirits/ corpses of R’ Ḥiyya’s sons respond to Rav Huna’s presence; Ḥizkiyya rises with a pillar of fire; Rav Ḥagga escapes unharmed by propping up the coffin

Rav Ḥisda’s Death: Torah Scroll Issue Reappears

1. They again propose placing a Torah scroll; R’ Yitzḥak objects: he did not approve this practice in life

2. They think they must not re-sew; R’ Yitzḥak bar Ami says: once they turn away from the bier, they may

Rabba bar Huna and Rav Hamnuna

1. Two coffins on camels reach a single-file bridge; animals stop

2. An Arab says the honor order requires Rabba bar Huna to go first; after saying this, his teeth fall out for disrespecting Rav Hamnuna

The Passage

Moed_Katan/25a#3 and on

Baraita - why do a person’s young children die? to generate mourning for an “upright person”

[...]

תניא:

מפני מה בניו ובנותיו של אדם מתים כשהן קטנים?

כדי שיבכה ויתאבל על אדם כשר.

[...]

[...]

it is taught in a baraita:

For what reason do a person’s sons and daughters die when they are young?

They die so that he will cry and mourn over the death of an upright person (אדם כשר).

[...]

R’ Shimon ben Elazar on Rending at Death - one who stands at the moment of death must rend garments, akin to a Torah scroll burning

תניא,

רבי שמעון בן אלעזר אומר:

העומד על המת בשעת יציאת נשמה —

חייב לקרוע.

למה זה דומה?

לספר תורה שנשרף,

שחייב לקרוע

[...]

it is taught in a baraita:

R’ Shimon ben Elazar says:

One who stands over the deceased at the time of the soul’s departure --

is obligated to rend his clothes.

To what may this be likened?

To a Torah scroll that is burned,

for which anyone present is obligated to rend his clothes.

[...]

Rav Safra’s Death and Keri‘a

Sages fail to rend garments since they “did not learn from him”; Abaye rebukes them: the baraita speaks of a “Torah scholar,” not “one’s teacher”; He notes that Rav Safra’s words are cited daily

כי נח נפשיה דרב ספרא,

לא קרעו רבנן עליה,

אמרי: לא גמרינן מיניה.

אמר להו אביי:

מי תניא ״הרב שמת״?!

״חכם שמת״ תניא.

ועוד: כל יומא שמעתתיה בפומין בבי מדרשא.

§ The Talmud relates that when Rav Safra passed away

the other Sages did not rend their garments over him.

They said: We did not learn from him, as he did not disseminate his Torah knowledge to the public.

Abaye berated them and said to them:

Is it taught in the baraita: If one’s teacher died?!

It is taught: If a Torah scholar died, and Rav Safra was certainly a Torah scholar.

And furthermore, every day his teachings are in our mouths in the study hall,

so that even if we did not learn directly from him, we should still be considered his students.

Sages think it is too late to rend; Abaye cites a tannaitic rule that as long as eulogies continue, people remain obligated

סבור: מה דהוה הוה.

אמר להו אביי,

תנינא:

חכם,

כל זמן שעוסקין בהספד —

חייבין לקרוע.

The other Sages thought that what was done was done, and it was now too late for them to rend their garments.

Abaye said to them:

We learned:

With regard to a Torah scholar,

as long as they are engaged in eulogizing him, then people are obligated to rend their garments, even after the time of his death.

They then want to rend immediately; Abaye says the scholar’s honor is at the eulogy

סבור למיקרע לאלתר,

אמר להו אביי:

תניא:

חכם כבודו בהספידו.

They then thought to rend their garments immediately.

Abaye said to them:

It is taught in a baraita:

A Torah scholar’s honor is at the time of his eulogy,

and so you should wait until the time of the eulogy before rending your garments.

Rav Huna’s Funeral: Torah Scroll on the Bier

They wish to place a Torah scroll beside Rav Huna; Rav Ḥisda objects: Rav Huna avoided sitting on a bed with a scroll

כי נח נפשיה דרב הונא,

סבור לאותובי ספר תורה אפורייה.

אמר להו רב חסדא:

מילתא דבחייה לא סבירא ליה,

השתא ליקום ליה ליעבד ליה?!

§ The Talmud relates another incident: When Rav Huna died

they thought to place a Torah scroll on his bier, as was commonly done after the death of a Torah scholar, as if to say that the deceased fulfilled everything written in the scroll.

Rav Ḥisda said to them:

This is a practice that he did not hold with during his lifetime;

now should we stand up and do it for him when he is dead?!

Evidence from Rav Taḥlifa

דאמר רב תחליפא:

אנא חזיתיה לרב הונא

דבעי למיתב אפורייה,

והוה מנח ספר תורה עליה,

וכף כדא אארעא

ואותיב ספר תורה עילויה.

אלמא קסבר: אסור לישב על גבי מטה שספר תורה מונח עליה.

As Rav Taḥlifa said:

I myself saw Rav Huna,

who wished to sit on his bed,

and there was a Torah scroll placed on it.

And he turned over (כף) a jug (כדא)

and placed the Torah scroll on it so that he could then sit on the bed.

Apparently he holds that it is prohibited to sit on a bed upon which a Torah scroll lies.

Therefore, it would be inappropriate to lay a Torah scroll next to his body after he died.

Bier does not fit; they consider lowering from roof; Rav Ḥisda opposes: a scholar’s honor is to exit through the door

לא הוה נפיק פוריא מבבא,

סבור לשלשולי דרך גגין.

אמר להו רב חסדא:

הא גמירנא מיניה:

חכם, כבודו דרך פתח.

When they tried to remove his corpse from his house for the burial, the bier (פוריא) would not fit through the narrow door.

They then thought to lower the bier from the roof.

Rav Ḥisda said to them:

This I learned from him, Rav Huna himself:

A scholar’s honor is for him to be taken out through the main opening,

and not in any other manner.

They consider transferring him to a smaller bier; Rav Ḥisda objects: a scholar must go out on the first bier

סבור לאשנויי מפוריא לפוריא.

אמר להו רב חסדא:

הכי גמירנא מיניה:

חכם כבודו במטה ראשונה.

They then thought to move him from his bier to a narrower bier so that it would fit through the door.

But Rav Ḥisda said to them:

I learned from him, Rav Huna himself, as follows:

A scholar — his honor is for him to be taken out on the first bier.

Prooftext from the Ark placed on a “new cart”(II Samuel 6:3); With no alternative, they break the doorway to maintain the honor constraints

דאמר רב יהודה, אמר רב:

מנין לחכם שכבודו במטה ראשונה?

שנאמר:

״וירכיבו את ארון האלהים אל עגלה חדשה״.

פרוס בבא, ואפקוה.

As Rav Yehuda said that Rav said:

From where is it derived that a scholar’s honor is for him to be taken out on the first bier?

As it is stated:

“And they set the Ark of God upon a new cart” (II Samuel 6:3).

they broke (פרוס) the doorway and took him out.1

R’ Shimon ben Pazi asks for a Torah allusion to grave-marking. He cites Ezekiel 39:15: “One who sees a human bone shall build a sign (ציון) beside it,” indicating an obligation to signal tum’ah to passersby.

Ravina challenges to Rav Ashi: Before Ezekiel, who ordained grave-marking? Rav Ashi answers by analogy to another halakha: Rav Ḥisda taught that the exclusion of an uncircumcised or “foreign-hearted” person from Temple service is learned from Ezekiel 44:9, not from the Torah of Moshe. Since this halakha clearly predated Ezekiel, it follows that both cases were received traditions (גמרא גמירי לה), and Ezekiel merely provided an asmakhta (Scriptural support). Thus, grave-marking existed by tradition; Ezekiel attached a verse to it.

Several Amoraim offer alternative verses indicating the requirement to warn others of impurity or clear obstacles:

• R’ Abbahu: “Impure, impure he shall call” (Lev. 13:45) — impurity must announce itself; the metzora warns others to avoid tum’ah. R’ Uzziel (grandson of R’ Uzziel the Great): same derivation — impurity calls out: “Separate.” (Baraita on the same verse: the metzora publicizes his distress so that the public may pray for him.)

• Abaye: “Do not put a stumbling block before the blind” (Lev. 19:14) — unmarked tum’ah is a stumbling block.

• Rav Pappa: “Pave, pave, clear the way” (Isa. 57:14) — remove obstacles from pathways, including hazards of tum’ah.

• Rav Ḥinnana: from the verse’s continuation — “Remove the stumbling block from the way of My people.”

• Rav Yehoshua b. Idi: “Show them the way in which they must walk” (Ex. 18:20) — ensuring navigable, safe, and pure pathways.

• Mar Zutra: “You shall separate the children of Israel from their impurity” (Lev. 15:31) — warn the public away from impurity.

• Rav Ashi: “You shall keep My charge” (Lev. 18:30) — make protective measures (משמרת למשמרתי), which includes marking sources of tum’ah.

• Ravina: “And to him who orders his way…” (Ps. 50:23) — designate ritually pure pathways.

R’ Yehoshua ben Levi is cited regarding a homily: One who “orders/appraises his ways” merits divine salvation, reading “וְשָׂם דרך” as “וְשָׁם דרך” — one who evaluates his conduct.

R’ Yannai applies the verse to a student who withholds challenges on festival Shabbat to avoid embarrassing his teacher.

Outline

Intro

The Passage

1. R’ Shimon ben Pazi - Marking (ציון) graves has a Torah allusion from Ezekiel’s description of setting up a sign (ציון) by a human bone - Ezekiel 39:15

2. Ravina (question to Rav Ashi) - Challenges using Ezekiel as the source: before Ezekiel, who required marking graves?

   1. Responds from Rav Ḥisda - The disqualification of an apostate or uncircumcised person from Temple service is derived from Ezekiel, not from Moses’ Torah - Ezekiel 44:9

   2. Both the Temple-service rule and grave-marking were known as received halakha, and Ezekiel merely supported them with verses

3. R’ Abbahu - Derives grave-marking from the metzora who must cry “Impure, impure,” ie, impurity must “announce itself” so others avoid it - Leviticus 13:45

4. R’ Uzziel, grandson of R’ Uzziel the Great - Same derash as R’ Abbahu: impurity “calls out” to warn others to separate - Leviticus 13:45

5. Baraita - “Impure, impure” requires the metzora to publicize his distress so the public will pray for him - Leviticus 13:45

6. Abaye - grave-marking derived from “Do not put a stumbling block before the blind” – unmarked impurity is a stumbling block - Leviticus 19:14

7. Rav Pappa - Derives from “Pave, pave, clear the way; remove the stumbling block from My people” (i.e. roads must be cleared of hazards like unmarked graves) - Isaiah 57:14

8. Rav Ḥinnana - Derives specifically from the continuation “Remove the stumbling block from the way of My people” - Isaiah 57:14

9. Rav Yehoshua b. Idi - Derives from “You shall show them the way in which they must walk” (part of “showing the way” is making roads navigable and pure) - Exodus 18:20

10. Mar Zutra - Derives from “You shall separate the children of Israel from their impurity” (people must be kept away from sources of impurity) - Leviticus 15:31

11. Rav Ashi - Derives from “You shall keep My charge” – make safeguards (“fences”) around My charge (including marking impurity) - Leviticus 18:30

12. Ravina - Derived from “And to him who orders his way…” (mark pure pathways appropriately) - Psalms 50:23

13. R’ Yehoshua ben Levi - whoever evaluates/orders his ways merits seeing God’s salvation

14. Prooftext -“ve-sam derekh” interpreted as “ve-sham derekh” - Psalms 50:23

15. R’ Yannai - Applies “And to him who orders his way…” to his student who refrains from challenging him on the festival Shabbat (to avoid embarrassing him) - Psalms 50:23

Appendix 1 - Practical Rules for Marking Public Ritual impurity

1. Baraita - Courts do not mark minimal impurity (olive-bulk, barley-bone, etc)

2. What They Do NOT Mark

3. ... but do mark spine, skull, majority of bones by structure/number

4. What They DO Mark:

5. Certain vs. Doubtful Impurity

6. Placement of Markers

Appendix 2 - Rules outlining what forms of water-infrastructure maintenance are permitted on Chol HaMoed (Moed Katan 5a)

1. Cleaning vs. Digging Cisterns (routine maintenance is acceptable but new construction is not)

2. Additional Limitations for Private Systems

3. A Third Baraita with Further Nuance

4. Broader Public-Works Activities (Deuteronomy 19:10)

The Passage

Moed_Katan/5a#13 and on

R’ Shimon ben Pazi - Marking (ציון) graves has a Torah allusion from Ezekiel’s description of setting up a sign (ציון) by a human bone - Ezekiel 39:15

מצינין את הקברות.

אמר רבי שמעון בן פזי:

רמז לציון קברות מן התורה מנין?

תלמוד לומר:

״וראה עצם אדם

ובנה אצלו ציון״.

§ It was taught in the Mishnah: One may mark graves on the intermediate days of a Festival so that passersby will know to avoid them and not become ritually impure.

R’ Shimon ben Pazi said:

Where is there an allusion in the Torah to the marking of graves?

The verse states:

“And when they that pass through shall pass through the land, and any see a man’s bone,

then shall he set up a sign by it” (Ezekiel 39:15).

Ezekiel prophesies that at some future time, the Jewish people will erect signs over the strewn remains of the dead so that others will know to avoid ritual impurity.

Ravina (question to Rav Ashi) - Challenges using Ezekiel as the source: before Ezekiel, who required marking graves?

אמר ליה רבינא לרב אשי:

הא מקמי דליתי יחזקאל,

מאן אמר?

Ravina said to Rav Ashi:

Before the prophet Ezekiel came and alluded to this obligation,

who said that graves must be marked?

Even before the time of Ezekiel, people were careful with regard to ritual impurity.

Responds from Rav Ḥisda - The disqualification of an apostate or uncircumcised person from Temple service is derived from Ezekiel, not from Moses’ Torah - Ezekiel 44:9

וליטעמיך,

הא דאמר רב חסדא:

דבר זה,

• מתורת משה רבינו לא למדנו,

• מדברי יחזקאל בן בוזי למדנו:

״כל בן נכר

ערל לב

וערל בשר

לא יבא אל מקדשי לשרתני״

Rav Ashi responded:

And according to your reasoning, that Ezekiel was introducing a new halakha,

the same question can be raised with regard to this statement that Rav Ḥisda said.

As Rav Ḥisda said with regard to the halakha that one who is uncircumcised or an apostate may not serve in the Temple:

• This matter we did not learn from the Torah of Moses our teacher,

• but rather, we learned it from the words of the prophet Ezekiel ben Buzi,

who said of such individuals:

“No stranger,

uncircumcised in heart,

or uncircumcised in flesh,

shall enter into My Sanctuary to serve Me” (Ezekiel 44:9).

Both the Temple-service rule and grave-marking were known as received halakha, and Ezekiel merely supported them with verses

מקמי דליתי יחזקאל,

מאן אמר?

• אלא

  • גמרא גמירי לה

  • ואתא יחזקאל ואסמכה אקרא,

• הכא נמי:

  • גמרא גמירי לה,

  • ואתא יחזקאל ואסמכה אקרא.

Here too, one can ask:

Before Ezekiel came,

who said that such individuals cannot serve in the Temple?

• Rather,

  • you must say that originally they learned it as a tradition (גמרא) and it was an accepted halakha for generations,

  • and then Ezekiel came and based it (אסמכה) on a verse.

• Here too, with regard to the obligation to mark graves,

  • they originally learned it as a tradition,

  • and then Ezekiel came and based it on a verse.

R’ Abbahu - Derives grave-marking from the metzora who must cry “Impure, impure,” ie, impurity must “announce itself” so others avoid it - Leviticus 13:45

רבי אבהו אמר,

מהכא:

״וטמא טמא יקרא״ —

טומאה קוראה לו

ואומרת לו ״פרוש״.

R’ Abbahu said:

An allusion to the marking of graves may be derived from here:

“And the metzora in whom the plague is, his clothes shall be rent, and the hair of his head shall go loose, and he shall cover his upper lip, and shall cry: Impure, impure” (Leviticus 13:45).

This verse teaches that impurity cries out to the passerby

and tells him: Remove yourself.2

R’ Uzziel, grandson of R’ Uzziel the Great - Same derash as R’ Abbahu: impurity “calls out” to warn others to separate - Leviticus 13:45

וכן אמר רבי עוזיאל בר בריה דרבי עוזיאל רבה:

טומאה קוראה לו

ואומרת לו ״פרוש״.

[...]

And similarly, R’ Uzziel, grandson of R’ Uzziel the Great, said:

Impurity cries out to the passerby

and tells him: Remove yourself.

[...]

Baraita - “Impure, impure” requires the metzora to publicize his distress so the public will pray for him - Leviticus 13:45

דתניא:

״וטמא טמא יקרא״.

צריך להודיע צערו לרבים,

ורבים מבקשין עליו רחמים

[...]

It was taught in the following baraita:

“And he shall cry: Impure, impure”;

this teaches that the metzora must inform the public of his distress,

and the public will pray for mercy on his behalf.

[...]

Abaye - grave-marking derived from “Do not put a stumbling block before the blind” – unmarked impurity is a stumbling block - Leviticus 19:14

אביי אמר,

מהכא:

״ולפני עור לא תתן מכשול״.

Abaye said:

An allusion to the marking of graves may be learned from here,

as it is written: “You shall not put a stumbling block before the blind” (Leviticus 19:14).

Rav Pappa - Derives from “Pave, pave, clear the way; remove the stumbling block from My people” (i.e. roads must be cleared of hazards like unmarked graves) - Isaiah 57:14

רב פפא אמר:

״ואמר:

סלו סלו

פנו דרך״.

Rav Pappa said the obligation is alluded to in the verse:

“And He will say:

Pave, pave,

clear the way,

take up the stumbling block out of the way of My people” (Isaiah 57:14),

which indicates that roads must be cleared of all obstacles and hazards.

Rav Ḥinnana - Derives specifically from the continuation “Remove the stumbling block from the way of My people” - Isaiah 57:14

רב חיננא אמר:

״הרימו מכשול מדרך עמי״.

Rav Ḥinnana said:

This may be derived from the end of that very same verse:

“Take up the stumbling block from the way of My people” (Isaiah 57:14).

Rav Yehoshua b. Idi - Derives from “You shall show them the way in which they must walk” (part of “showing the way” is making roads navigable and pure) - Exodus 18:20

רבי יהושע בריה דרב אידי אמר:

״והודעת להם את הדרך אשר ילכו בה״.

R’ Yehoshua, son of Rav Idi, said:

This may be derived from the verse:

“And you shall show them the way in which they must walk” (Exodus 18:20),

i.e., you must properly repair the roads, which includes marking graves.

Mar Zutra - Derives from “You shall separate the children of Israel from their impurity” (people must be kept away from sources of impurity) - Leviticus 15:31

מר זוטרא אמר:

״והזרתם את בני ישראל מטומאתם״.

Mar Zutra said that

an allusion to this obligation is found in the verse

“Thus you shall separate the children of Israel from their impurity” (Leviticus 15:31),

which indicates that people must be warned to stay away from that which could cause them to become ritually impure.

Rav Ashi - Derives from “You shall keep My charge” – make safeguards (“fences”) around My charge (including marking impurity) - Leviticus 18:30

רב אשי אמר:

״ושמרתם את משמרתי״

עשו משמרת למשמרתי.

Rav Ashi said

it is derived from the verse:

“And you shall keep My charge” (Leviticus 18:30),

which means that you must establish a safeguard (משמרת) for My charge3

Ravina - Derived from “And to him who orders his way…” (mark pure pathways appropriately) - Psalms 50:23

רבינא אמר:

״ושם דרך

אראנו בישע אלהים״.

And finally, Ravina said:

This obligation is alluded to by the verse

“And to him who orders his way,

I will show the salvation of God” (Psalms 50:23),

meaning that one must mark the pathways that are ritually pure and upon which it is appropriate to walk.

R’ Yehoshua ben Levi - whoever evaluates/orders his ways merits seeing God’s salvation (in the messianic future)

אמר רבי יהושע בן לוי:

כל השם אורחותיו —

זוכה ורואה בישועתו של הקדוש ברוך הוא,

With regard to the verse from Psalms cited above,

R’ Yehoshua ben Levi said:

Whoever appraises his ways in this world and contemplates how to act in the most appropriate way possible --

merits seeing the salvation of God (in the messianic future)

Prooftext -“ve-sam derekh” interpreted as “ve-sham derekh” - Psalms 50:23

שנאמר: ״ושם דרך״,

אל תקרי ״ושם״,

אלא: ״ושם דרך״

״אראנו בישע אלהים״.

as it is stated: “And to him who orders his way.”

Do not read it as ve-sam, “orders”;

Rather, read it as ve-sham, “appraises”.

With this reading, the verse indicates that “one who appraises his ways”,

“him will I show the salvation of God.”

R’ Yannai - Applies “And to him who orders his way…” to his student who refrains from challenging him on the festival Shabbat (to avoid embarrassing him) - Psalms 50:23

רבי ינאי הוה ליה ההוא תלמידא ד

• כל יומא

  • הוה מקשי ליה,

• בשבתא דריגלא

  • לא הוה מקשי ליה,

קרי עליה:

״ושם דרך

אראנו בישע אלהים״.

R’ Yannai had a certain student who

• every day as they were learning

  • would raise difficulties with his teachings

• On Shabbat of a Festival, when the broader public would come to hear the lesson,

  • the student would not raise any difficulties, lest R’ Yannai lack an immediate answer and suffer embarrassment.

R’ Yannai read this verse about him:

“And to him who orders his way,

I will show the salvation of God” (Psalms 50:23),

for he considered his conduct and determined when it was inappropriate to challenge his master.

Appendix 1 - Practical Rules for Marking Public Ritual impurity

The sugya cites a lengthy baraita detailing when and how courts mark impurity.

Baraita - Courts do not mark minimal impurity (olive-bulk, barley-bone, etc)

What They Do NOT Mark

• Not for minimal impurity:

  • k’zayit of corpse-flesh,

  • a barley-grain-sized bone,

  • anything that does not convey tum’ah by Ohel.

These are too small and marking them would be excessive.

תנו רבנן:

אין מצינין

1. לא על כזית מן המת,

2. ולא על עצם כשעורה,

3. ולא על דבר שאינו מטמא באהל.

§ With regard to the halakhot of marking graves, A baraita states the following:

The courts do not mark

1. the area of an olive-bulk of a corpse;

2. nor of a bone that is the size of a barleygrain-bulk;

3. nor of any item that imparts impurity only through physical contact but does not impart ritual impurity by means of a tent to an individual or object that it overshadows, or that is overshadowed by it, or that is found together with it under the same structure.

... but do mark spine, skull, majority of bones by structure/number

What They DO Mark:

• Spine (שדרה)

• Skull (גולגולת)

• Majority of the body’s structure (רוב בנין)

• Majority of the body’s bones (רוב מנין)

אבל מצינין

1. על השדרה,

2. ועל הגולגולת,

3. על רוב בנין,

4. ועל רוב מנין המת.

But they do mark

1. the area of the spine of a corpse,

2. the skull,

3. or the bones that comprise the majority of the skeletal structure

4. or the majority of the number of bones in the body.

Certain vs. Doubtful Impurity

They mark doubtful, not obvious, impurity:

• They do not mark obvious, well-known certain impurity (וודאות).

• They do mark doubtful cases (ספיקות):

  • Overhanging branches (סככות) where a corpse may lie beneath

  • Protruding rocks (פרעות) with possible concealment

  • Beit ha-Peras, an area where plowed earth may contain dispersed bone fragments

ואין מצינין על הוודאות,

אבל מצינין על הספיקות.

ואלו הן הספיקות:

1. סככות

2. ופרעות

3. ובית הפרס.

And furthermore, they do not mark the area of certain ritual impurity, i.e., a place that is known to all as ritually impure,

but they do mark a place of uncertain ritual impurity.

And these are the places of uncertain ritual impurity:

1. Overhanging boughs (סככות),

2. protrusions (פרעות),

3. and a beit ha-peras.

Placement of Markers

They do not place the marker on top of the tum’ah, to avoid accidental contact before noticing the sign, which would destroy taharot being carried.

They do not place the marker too far from the tum’ah, to avoid unnecessarily restricting usable land in Eretz Yisrael.

• ואין מעמידין ציון במקום טומאה,

  • שלא להפסיד את הטהרות.

• ואין מרחיקין ציון ממקום טומאה,

  • שלא להפסיד את ארץ ישראל.

• And they do not erect the marker directly over the site of the ritual impurity,

  • so as not to cause a loss of ritually pure food items, as one who is carrying such food might inadvertently walk up to the site of ritual impurity and only then notice the marker, after the food has already contracted impurity.

• Similarly, they do not distance the marker from the actual site of ritual impurity,

  • so as not to cause a loss of Eretz Yisrael, i.e., so as not to increase the area into which individuals refrain from entering.

Appendix 2 - Rules outlining what forms of water-infrastructure maintenance are permitted on Chol HaMoed (Moed Katan 5a)

The Talmud presents several baraitot outlining what forms of water-infrastructure (בורות שיחין ומערות) maintenance are permitted on Chol HaMoed.

The baraitot consistently distinguish between systems serving individuals and those serving the public.

Minor maintenance for private installations is allowed, but more labor-intensive work is restricted; public needs justify broader allowances, including digging and plastering.

Cleaning vs. Digging Cisterns (routine maintenance is acceptable but new construction is not)

A baraita permits removing accumulated debris4 from private cisterns, and a fortiori from public ones, on chol ha-moed.

However, digging new installations is barred even for public use, and a fortiori for private use.

[...]

תניא:

• חוטטין בורות שיחין ומערות של יחיד,

  • ואין צריך לומר של רבים,

• ואין חופרין בורות שיחין ומערות של רבים,

  • ואין צריך לומר של יחיד.

[...]

[...]

It is taught in a baraita:

• One may clean out cisterns, ditches, and caves of an individual during the intermediate days of a Festival,

  • And, needless to say, one may clean out those of the public.

• But one may not dig new cisterns, ditches, or caves of the public during the intermediate days of a Festival,

  • And, needless to say, one may not dig those of an individual.

[...]

Additional Limitations for Private Systems

A second baraita asserts that for private cisterns one may only allow water to collect; cleaning and plastering cracks are prohibited.

Public cisterns, by contrast, may be cleaned and plastered.

(This reflects a hierarchy of need: communal water infrastructure justifies more strenuous labor.)

תניא:

בורות שיחין ומערות

של יחיד —

כונסין מים לתוכן,

אבל

1. לא חוטטין

2. ולא שפין את סדקיהן.

ושל רבים —

1. חוטטין אותן

2. ושפין את סדקיהן.

[...]

It is taught in a baraita:

cisterns, ditches, and caves

of an individual --

One may gather water into them

but

1. one may not clean them out

2. or plaster their cracks;

but for those of the public,

1. one may indeed clean out

2. and plaster their cracks

[...]

A Third Baraita with Further Nuance

A further baraita broadens what counts as permissible for private systems—cleaning is allowed—but still prohibits plastering, filling cracks with earth, or liming.

Public cisterns may be fully excavated and limed.

(The baraita implies that structural reinforcement is considered closer to construction and therefore prohibited for private needs.)

תניא:

בורות שיחין ומערות

של יחיד —

1. כונסין מים לתוכן

2. וחוטטין אותן,

אבל

1. לא שפין את סדקיהן,

2. ולא חוטטין לתוכן,

3. ולא סדין אותן בסיד.

ושל רבים —

1. חופרין אותן,

2. וסדין אותן בסיד

[...]

It is taught in yet another baraita:

cisterns, ditches, and caves

of an individual --

1. One may gather water into them

2. and one may clean them out,

but one may not

1. plaster their cracks,

2. clear earth into them in order to fill in the cracks,

3. or lime them with lime so that they hold water.

But with regard to those of the public,

1. one may even dig them out

2. and lime them with lime.

Therefore, in a case where the public needs them, it is permitted to dig out public cisterns.

[...]

Broader Public-Works Activities (Deuteronomy 19:10)

A separate baraita extends permitted festival labor to clearing thorns (לקווץ) from roads, repairing streets and highways,5 and measuring mikva’ot to ensure they meet the 40-se’a minimum.

תניא:

יוצאין

1. לקווץ את הדרכים,

2. ולתקן את הרחובות ואת האסטרטאות,

3. ולמוד את המקואות.

It is taught in the following baraita:

On the intermediate days of a Festival, agents of the court go out

1. to clear thorns (לקווץ) from the road,

2. and to repair the city streets and highways [isterata’ot],

3. and to measure the ritual baths to ascertain that they have the requisite quantity of water.

If a mikveh is deficient, water may be routed into it in a way that avoids the status of “drawn water.”

וכל מקוה שאין בו ארבעים סאה --

מרגילין לתוכו ארבעים סאה.

And if any mikveh does not contain forty se’a the minimal measure for ritual purification —

they direct [margilin] a stream of water into it, such that it flows over the ground before entering the bath, so as not to disqualify the water as drawn water until it holds forty se’a of water.

The baraita then cites Deuteronomy 19:10 (“and so blood be upon you”) to derive that failure to perform these public-safety tasks makes the court morally responsible for preventable deaths.6

ומנין שאם לא יצאו ועשו כל אלו,

שכל דמים שנשפכו שם

מעלה עליהם הכתוב כאילו הם שפכום?

תלמוד לומר:

״והיה עליך דמים״.

And from where is it derived that if agents of the court did not go out and do all these repairs,

that with regard to any blood that is shed there on account of their negligence,

the verse ascribes to them guilt as if they had shed it?

The verse states with regard to the cities of refuge that offer protection to someone who committed inadvertent manslaughter:

“That innocent blood be not shed in your land, which YHWH your God gives you for an inheritance, and so blood be upon you” (Deuteronomy 19:10).

The Talmud initially asks for the basis of the obligation to recite blessings over food, but the discussion quickly develops into a broader account of ownership, consumption, work, Torah study, and agricultural obligation.

The first section treats eating without a blessing as a form of unauthorized use. A baraita derives blessing from the phrase “kodesh hillulim“ in Leviticus 19:24, and R’ Akiva formulates the rule that one may not taste anything before reciting a blessing. Other statements sharpen the idea: benefiting from the world without a blessing is compared to misuse of consecrated property. R’ Levi reconciles two apparently contradictory Psalms by distinguishing between the world before and after a blessing. Before the blessing, “the earth and all it contains is YHWH’s”; afterward, “the earth He has given to mankind.” The blessing thus marks a transition from divine ownership to permitted human use. R’ Ḥanina bar Pappa intensifies the rhetoric further, describing unblessed consumption as robbery of both God and the community of Israel.

From this theology of consumption, the sugya moves naturally into agricultural production. A contradiction between “My grain” in Hosea and “your grain” in Deuteronomy is resolved according to whether Israel fulfills God’s will. This leads into one of the Talmud’s best-known discussions of Torah study and work. R’ Yishmael reads “you shall gather your grain” as an instruction to combine Torah study with ordinary economic activity. R’ Shimon ben Yoḥai objects that continuous attention to plowing, sowing, harvesting, threshing, and winnowing would leave no time for Torah; ideally, Israel’s labor should instead be performed by others.

The subsequent statements largely qualify the more radical position. Abaye observes that many who followed R’ Yishmael succeeded, whereas many who attempted R’ Shimon ben Yoḥai’s model did not. Rava instructs his students to leave the academy during the crucial agricultural periods of Nisan (early spring season) and Tishrei (early autumn season) so that they can secure their livelihood and study during the rest of the year. A final contrast between “earlier” and “later generations” presents Torah and labor as questions of priority: earlier generations made Torah primary and work secondary and succeeded in both, whereas later generations reversed the hierarchy and succeeded in neither.

The same contrast1 is then expressed through agricultural law. “Earlier generations” deliberately brought produce through the entrance that would render it liable for tithes, while “later generations” sought routes that would avoid the obligation.

Across these discussions, growing, possessing, eating, and blessing food are embedded in a system of divine ownership, human labor, Torah study, and religious obligation. The sugya thus uses the laws of food blessings as an entry point into a wider discussion of the proper relationship between material life and service of God.

Outline

Intro

The Passage

Mishnah (Berakhot 6:1)

1. Blessings over foods: tree fruit = borei peri ha-etz; wine = borei peri ha-gefen; produce = borei peri ha-adama; bread = ha-motzi; vegetables = borei peri ha-adama; R’ Yehuda - Over vegetables, recite “borei minei desha’im”

Talmud

1. Baraita - “Kodesh hillulim” teaches that fourth-year fruit requires blessings before and after eating - Leviticus 19:24

2. R’ Akiva - One may not taste anything before reciting a blessing - Leviticus 19:24

3. Baraita - One may not benefit from this world without a blessing; doing so is comparable to misuse of consecrated property

4. Rav Yehuda citing Shmuel - Benefiting from this world without a blessing is like benefiting from consecrated property - Psalms 24:1

5. R’ Levi - Before a blessing the earth belongs to God; after a blessing, it is given to humanity - Psalms 24:1; Psalms 115:16

6. R’ Ḥanina bar Pappa - Benefiting without a blessing is like robbing God and the community of Israel

   1. Prooftexts - Proverbs 1:8, 28:24; Deuteronomy 32:6

7. R’ Ḥanina bar Pappa - Such a person is compared to Jeroboam ben Nevat, who corrupted Israel - Proverbs 28:24

8. R’ Ḥanina bar Pappa - When Israel does God’s will, the grain is theirs; when they do not, God reclaims it - Hosea 2:11; Deuteronomy 11:14

9. R’ Yishmael - Torah study should be combined with ordinary work and agriculture - Joshua 1:8; Deuteronomy 11:14

10. R’ Shimon ben Yoḥai - Ideally one should devote oneself to Torah

    1. When Israel does God’s will, others perform their labor - Isaiah 61:5

11. Abaye - Many who followed R’ Yishmael’s model succeeded, while many who followed R’ Shimon ben Yoḥai’s model did not

12. Rava - Students should work during the key agricultural seasons of Nisan and Tishrei, so they can study without financial distraction during the rest of the year

13. Rabba bar bar Ḥana citing R’ Yoḥanan citing R’ Yehuda bar Ilai - Earlier generations made Torah primary and work secondary and succeeded in both; later generations reversed the priorities and succeeded in neither

14. Rabba bar bar Ḥana citing R’ Yoḥanan citing R’ Yehuda bar Ilai - Earlier generations deliberately brought produce through the main entrance to incur tithing obligations; later generations sought routes that avoided them

The Passage

Berakhot/35a#1 thru 35b#11

Mishnah (Berakhot 6:1)

Mishnah (Berakhot 6:1)

Blessings over foods: tree fruit = borei peri ha-etz; wine = borei peri ha-gefen; produce = borei peri ha-adama; bread = ha-motzi; vegetables = borei peri ha-adama; R’ Yehuda - Over vegetables, recite “borei minei desha’im”

כיצד מברכין על הפירות?

1. על פירות האילן הוא אומר:

   1. ״בורא פרי העץ״,

2. חוץ מן היין, שעל היין הוא אומר:

   1. ״בורא פרי הגפן״.

3. ועל פירות הארץ הוא אומר:

   1. ״בורא פרי האדמה״,

4. חוץ מן הפת, שעל הפת הוא אומר:

   1. ״המוציא לחם מן הארץ״.

5. ועל הירקות הוא אומר:

   1. ״בורא פרי האדמה״.

   2. רבי יהודה אומר: ״בורא מיני דשאים״.

This Mishnah discusses the blessings recited over various foods.

How does one recite a blessing over fruits?

1. Over different fruits that grow on a tree one recites:

   1. Who creates fruit of the tree,

2. with the exception of wine.2 Over wine one recites:

   1. Who creates fruit of the vine.

3. Over fruits that grow from the earth,

   1. one recites: Who creates fruit of the ground,

4. with the exception of bread. Bread, too, is significant and its blessing differs from other fruits of the ground, as over bread one recites:

   1. Who brings forth bread from the earth.

5. Over herbs and leafy vegetables one recites:

   1. Who creates fruit of the ground.

6. R’ Yehuda says that there is room to distinguish between fruits that grow from the earth, herbs, and leafy vegetables. Although they are all fruit of the ground, since they have different qualities, the blessing on the latter is: Who creates various kinds of herbs.

Talmud

Baraita - “Kodesh hillulim” teaches that fourth-year fruit requires blessings before and after eating - Leviticus 19:24

מנא הני מילי?

Concerning the fundamental basis for blessings, the Talmud asks:

From where are these matters,

the obligation to recite a blessing before eating, derived?

דתנו רבנן:

״קדש הלולים לה׳ ״,

מלמד ש

טעונים ברכה

• לפניהם

• ולאחריהם.

The Talmud answers:

As A baraita states in the Sifra:

With regard to saplings, it is stated that in their 4th year their fruit will be:

“…sanctified for praises before YHWH” (Leviticus 19:24).

This verse teaches that

they require praise of God in the form of a blessing both

• before

• and after,

as the verse says “praises” (הלולים) in the plural.

R’ Akiva - One may not taste anything before reciting a blessing - Leviticus 19:24

מכאן אמר רבי עקיבא:

אסור לאדם שיטעום כלום קודם שיברך.

[...]

From here, R’ Akiva said:

A person is forbidden to taste anything before he recites a blessing,

as without reciting praise over food, it has the status of a consecrated item, from which one is forbidden to derive pleasure.

[...]

Baraita - One may not benefit from this world without a blessing; doing so is comparable to misuse of consecrated property

תנו רבנן:

אסור לו לאדם שיהנה מן העולם הזה בלא ברכה.

וכל הנהנה מן העולם הזה בלא ברכה --

מעל.

[...]

A baraita states in a Tosefta:

One is forbidden to derive benefit from this world, which is the property of God, without reciting a blessing beforehand.

And anyone who derives benefit from this world without a blessing --

it is as if he is guilty of misuse (מעל) of a consecrated object.

[...]

Rav Yehuda citing Shmuel - Benefiting from this world without a blessing is like benefiting from consecrated property - Psalms 24:1

אמר רב יהודה, אמר שמואל:

כל הנהנה מן העולם הזה בלא ברכה —

כאילו נהנה מקדשי שמים,

שנאמר:

״לה׳ הארץ ומלואה״.

Similarly, Rav Yehuda said that Shmuel said:

One who derives benefit from this world without a blessing —

it is as if he enjoyed objects consecrated (קדשי) to the heavens,

as it is stated:

“The earth and all it contains is YHWH’s,

the world and all those who live in it” (Psalms 24:1).

R’ Levi - Before a blessing the earth belongs to God; after a blessing, it is given to humanity - Psalms 24:1; Psalms 115:16

רבי לוי רמי:

• כתיב

  • ״לה׳ הארץ ומלואה״,

• וכתיב

  • ״השמים שמים לה׳, והארץ נתן לבני אדם״

R’ Levi expressed this concept differently.

R’ Levi raised a contradiction:

• It is written:

  • “The earth and all it contains is YHWH’s,”

• and it is written elsewhere:

  • “The heavens are YHWH’s, and the earth He has given over to mankind” (Psalms 115:16).

There is clearly a contradiction with regard to whom the earth belongs.

לא קשיא

• כאן

  • קודם ברכה,

• כאן

  • לאחר ברכה.

He resolves the contradiction:

This is not difficult:

• Here, where the verse that says that the earth is YHWH’s

  • refers to the situation before a blessing is recited,

• and here, where it says that He gave the earth to mankind

  • refers to after a blessing is recited.

R’ Ḥanina bar Pappa - Benefiting without a blessing is like robbing God and the community of Israel

אמר רבי חנינא בר פפא:

כל הנהנה מן העולם הזה בלא ברכה —

כאילו גוזל להקדוש ברוך הוא וכנסת ישראל,

R’ Ḥanina bar Pappa said:

Anyone who derives benefit from this world without a blessing —

it is as if he stole from God and the community of Israel,

Prooftexts - Proverbs 1:8, 28:24; Deuteronomy 32:6

שנאמר:

״גוזל אביו ואמו

ואומר אין פשע

חבר הוא לאיש משחית״.

as it is stated:

“Whoever robs his father and his mother

and says: It is no transgression,

he is the companion of a destroyer” (Proverbs 28:24).

ואין ״אביו״ אלא הקדוש ברוך הוא,

שנאמר:

״הלא הוא אביך קנך״,

The phrase “his father” refers to none other than God,

as it is stated:

“Is He not your Father Who created you,

Who made you and established you” (Deuteronomy 32:6).

ואין ״אמו״ אלא כנסת ישראל,

שנאמר:

״שמע בני מוסר אביך

ואל תטוש תורת אמך״.

The phrase “his mother” refers to none other than the community of Israel,

as it is stated:

“Hear, my son, the discipline of your father,

and do not forsake the Torah of your mother” (Proverbs 1:8).3

R’ Ḥanina bar Pappa - Such a person is compared to Jeroboam ben Nevat, who corrupted Israel - Proverbs 28:24

מאי ״חבר הוא לאיש משחית״?

אמר רבי חנינא בר פפא:

חבר הוא לירבעם בן נבט

שהשחית את ישראל לאביהם שבשמים.

What is the meaning of the continuation of the verse: “He is the companion of a destroyer”?

R’ Ḥanina bar Pappa said:

He is a companion of Jeroboam ben Nevat,

who corrupted Israel before their Father in heaven by sinning and causing others to sin.

R’ Ḥanina bar Pappa - When Israel does God’s will, the grain is theirs; when they do not, God reclaims it - Hosea 2:11; Deuteronomy 11:14

רבי חנינא בר פפא רמי:

• כתיב

  • ״ולקחתי דגני בעתו וגו׳״,

• וכתיב

  • ״ואספת דגנך וגו׳״.

On a similar note, the Talmud cites that R’ Ḥanina bar Pappa raised a contradiction:

• It is written,

  • “I will take back My grain at its time and wine in its season” (Hosea 2:11),

• and it is written:

  • “And you should gather your grain, your wine and your oil” (Deuteronomy 11:14).

To whom does the grain belong, to God, or to the people?

לא קשיא:

• כאן

  • בזמן שישראל עושין רצונו של מקום,

• כאן

  • בזמן שאין ישראל עושין רצונו של מקום.

The Talmud responds: This is not difficult:

• Here, where God promises Israel that they will gather their grain,

  • the verse refers to a time when they perform God’s will.

• Here, where the verse indicates that the grain belongs to God,

  • it refers to a time when they do not perform God’s will, as then He will take back the grain, demonstrating that it belongs to Him.

R’ Yishmael - Torah study should be combined with ordinary work and agriculture - Joshua 1:8; Deuteronomy 11:14

תנו רבנן:

״ואספת דגנך״ מה תלמוד לומר?

A baraita states:

What is the meaning of that which the verse states: “And you should gather your grain”?

לפי שנאמר:

״לא ימוש ספר התורה הזה מפיך״⁠ ⁠—

יכול דברים ככתבן?

Because it is stated:

“This Torah should not depart from your mouths,

and you should contemplate in it day and night” (Joshua 1:8),

I might have thought that these matters are to be understood as they are written;

one is to literally spend his days immersed exclusively in Torah study.

תלמוד לומר:

״ואספת דגנך״⁠ ⁠—

הנהג בהן מנהג דרך ארץ,

דברי רבי ישמעאל.

Therefore, the verse states:

“And you should gather your grain, your wine and your oil,”

assume in their regard, the way of the world; set aside time not only for Torah, but also for work.

This is the statement of R’ Yishmael.

R’ Shimon ben Yoḥai - Ideally one should devote oneself to Torah

רבי שמעון בן יוחאי אומר:

אפשר אדם

1. חורש בשעת חרישה,

2. וזורע בשעת זריעה,

3. וקוצר בשעת קצירה,

4. ודש בשעת דישה,

5. וזורה בשעת הרוח,

תורה מה תהא עליה?

R’ Shimon ben Yoḥai says:

Is it possible that a person

1. plows in the plowing season4

2. and sows in the sowing season

3. and harvests in the harvest season

4. and threshes in the threshing season

5. and winnows (זורה) in the windy season, as grain is separated from the chaff by means of the wind,

and is thus constantly busy; what will become of Torah?

when Israel does God’s will, others perform their labor, - Isaiah 61:5

אלא

בזמן שישראל עושין רצונו של מקום ⁠—

מלאכתן נעשית על ידי אחרים,

Rather, one must dedicate himself exclusively to Torah at the expense of other endeavors;

as when Israel performs God’s will —

their work is performed by others,5

שנאמר:

״ועמדו זרים ורעו צאנכם וגו׳״,

as it is stated:

“And strangers will stand and feed your flocks,

and foreigners will be your plowmen and your vinedressers” (Isaiah 61:5).

... while failure to do so brings servitude - Deuteronomy 11:14; Deuteronomy 28:48

ובזמן שאין ישראל עושין רצונו של מקום ⁠—

מלאכתן נעשית על ידי עצמן,

שנאמר:

״ואספת דגנך״.

When Israel does not perform God’s will --

their work is performed by them themselves,

as it is stated:

“And you should gather your grain.”

ולא עוד אלא שמלאכת אחרים נעשית על ידן,

שנאמר:

״ועבדת את אויבך וגו׳״.

Moreover, if Israel fails to perform God’s will, others’ work will be performed by them,

as it is stated:

“You should serve your enemy

whom God should send against you, in hunger, in thirst, in nakedness and in want of all things” (Deuteronomy 28:48).

Abaye - Many who followed R’ Yishmael’s model succeeded, while many who followed R’ Shimon ben Yoḥai’s model did not

אמר אביי:

• הרבה עשו כרבי ישמעאל,

  • ועלתה בידן.

• כרבי שמעון בן יוחי,

  • ולא עלתה בידן.

Summing up this dispute,

Abaye said:

Although there is room for both opinions,

• many have acted in accordance with the opinion of R’ Yishmael, and combined working for a living and learning Torah,

  • and although they engaged in activities other than the study of Torah, were successful in their Torah study.

• Many have acted in accordance with the opinion of R’ Shimon ben Yoḥai

  • and were not successful in their Torah study. They were ultimately forced to abandon their Torah study altogether.

Rava - Students should work during the key agricultural seasons of Nisan and Tishrei, so they can study without financial distraction during the rest of the year

אמר להו רבא לרבנן:

במטותא מינייכו!

ביומי ניסן וביומי תשרי --

לא תתחזו קמאי,

כי היכי דלא תטרדו במזונייכו כולא שתא.

Similarly, Rava said to the rabbis who would attend his study hall:

I implore you!

during the months of Nisan and Tishrei, the crucial agricultural periods6 --

do not appear before me.

Engage in your agricultural work then so that you will not be preoccupied with your sustenance all year.

Rabba bar bar Ḥana citing R’ Yoḥanan citing R’ Yehuda bar Ilai - Earlier generations made Torah primary and work secondary and succeeded in both; later generations reversed the priorities and succeeded in neither

1. אמר רבה בר בר חנה

2. אמר רבי יוחנן

3. משום רבי יהודה ברבי אלעאי:

בא וראה שלא כדורות הראשונים דורות האחרונים.

Summarizing these statements,

1. Rabba bar bar Ḥana said that

2. R’ Yoḥanan said

3. in the name of the tanna R’ Yehuda, son of R’ El’ai:

Come and see that the latter generations are not like the earlier generations;

rather they are their inferiors.7

• דורות הראשונים

  • עשו תורתן קבע, ומלאכתן עראי,

  • זו וזו נתקיימה בידן.

• דורות האחרונים

  • שעשו מלאכתן קבע, ותורתן עראי,

  • זו וזו לא נתקיימה בידן.

• The earlier generations

  • made their Torah permanent, and their work occasional,

  • and this, Torah study, and that, their work, were successful for them.

• In contrast, the latter generations

  • who made their work permanent, and their Torah occasional,

  • neither this nor that was successful for them.

Rabba bar bar Ḥana citing R’ Yoḥanan citing R’ Yehuda bar Ilai - Earlier generations deliberately brought produce through the main entrance to incur tithing obligations; later generations sought routes that avoided them

1. ואמר רבה בר בר חנה

2. אמר רבי יוחנן

3. משום רבי יהודה ברבי אלעאי:

בא וראה שלא כדורות הראשונים דורות האחרונים:

• דורות הראשונים --

  • היו מכניסין פירותיהן דרך טרקסמון

  • כדי לחייבן במעשר,

• דורות האחרונים --

  • מכניסין פירותיהן

    • דרך גגות,

    • דרך חצרות,

    • דרך קרפיפות,

  • כדי לפטרן מן המעשר.

Along these lines,

1. Rabba bar bar Ḥana said that

2. R’ Yoḥanan said

3. in the name of R’ Yehuda, son of R’ El’ai:

Come and see that the latter generations are not like the earlier generations:

• In the earlier generations --

  • people would bring their fruits into their courtyards through the main gate8

  • in order to obligate them in tithes.

• In contrast, the latter generations --

  • bring their fruits

    • through roofs,

    • through courtyards

    • and through enclosed courtyards,

  • avoiding the main gate in order to exempt them from the mitzva of tithing.

My list of named Jewish women has just twenty-nine entries. By comparison, the survey as a whole includes well over a thousand names, almost all of them men, and most of them rabbis. Of course, the fact that women are so underrepresented in the Talmud is hardly surprising. But when I went through the names individually, several patterns stood out, both in how the Talmud identifies women and in the kinds of stories where their names appear.

Named through someone else

The first thing worth pointing out is that most women mentioned in the Talmud aren’t named at all. Instead, they’re identified by their relationship to a man. The Aramaic phrase deveithu de-X, “the wife of X”, appears in about thirty passages of the Babylonian Talmud; berateih de-X, “the daughter of X”, in about twenty-five; and imeih de-X, “the mother of X”, in roughly the same number. Rav Pappa’s wife, Rav Yosef’s wife, Rav Ḥisda’s daughter, Abaye’s mother: these women speak, act, and are sometimes quoted at length, but we’re never told their names.

Even when a woman is named, she’s often identified in relation to men. The best-known female scholar of the rabbinic period is introduced in the Babylonian Talmud as “Beruria, the wife of Rabbi Meir, the daughter of Rabbi Ḥanina ben Teradyon” (Avodah Zarah 18a). Yalta is identified as Rav Naḥman’s wife, Ḥoma as Abaye’s wife, and Yehudit as Rabbi Ḥiyya’s wife.

The reverse situation, where a man is named after a woman, is much less common. There are a few rabbis with matronymics, meaning names derived from their mothers rather than their fathers. One example is Abba Shaul ben Imma Miriam. Another is Rav Mari bar Raḥel, who is named after his mother, Shmuel’s daughter. The usual explanation connects this to a story in which she was taken captive and her son was born to a convert.

There’s also Abba bar Marta, whom the Talmud explicitly identifies as Abba bar Minyumi. Aharon Hyman suggested that he was named after his mother because of a story in which she saved his life.

Whatever the explanation for each individual case, these are exceptions. The standard practice in rabbinic literature is to identify a man by his father’s name.

“What is your name?”

The second pattern is especially interesting. In several Talmudic stories, a rabbi meets a woman and asks her name, mah shemekh? (”What is your name?”). Her answer then plays a central role in what happens next.

One example involves a neighbor of Rabbi Ḥanina ben Dosa who was building a house. The ceiling beams were too short to reach from one wall to the other, so she came to him for help. He asked her name, and she answered Ikku. He responded with a pun on her name: Ikku, “if so”, may your beams reach (Taanit 25a). According to a baraita, the beams then extended a cubit beyond the walls on each side. The sage Palaimo even claimed to have seen the house.

Another example appears in a story about Rav Adda bar Ahava. He saw a woman in the market wearing a garment made from a forbidden mixture of wool and linen. Assuming she was Jewish, he tore it off her. It turned out that she wasn’t Jewish, and he was fined four hundred zuz for humiliating her.

He then asked her name. She answered Matun, and he responded: Matun, matun, two hundred plus two hundred, four hundred zuz (Berakhot 20a). The joke is based on the similarity between her name and the Aramaic word for “two hundred”.

A third example concerns Rabbi Mani, who complained to his teacher, Rabbi Yitzḥak, that his wife wasn’t beautiful. Rabbi Yitzḥak asked what her name was. When he was told that it was Ḥana, he declared, “Let Ḥana become beautiful”, and she did. But she then became arrogant, so Rabbi Mani complained again. Rabbi Yitzḥak responded, “Let Ḥana return to her blackness” (Taanit 23b).

In this case, there’s no real pun involved. Instead, asking for her name seems to be part of the process of bringing about the change.

Perhaps the most elaborate example appears in a legal discussion in Nedarim. A man had vowed that his wife couldn’t benefit from him until she showed Rabbi Yishmael son of Rabbi Yosei something beautiful about herself. Rabbi Yishmael and those around him examined her features one by one, but found fault with all of them: her head was round, her hair resembled flax, her eyes were narrow, and her feet were as wide as a goose’s.

Finally, Rabbi Yishmael asked whether her name might be beautiful. Her name, it turned out, was Likhlukhit, roughly “little dirty one”. He declared that her name suited her, since she was covered in blemishes, and on that basis released her husband from the vow (Nedarim 66b - I discussed this sugya in a previous piece of mine as well.).

It’s a rather cruel (and misogynistic) story, but the reasoning is interesting: the fact that a name accurately describes someone is treated as a kind of beauty.

What’s especially interesting about these stories is that the woman’s name is often almost the only personal detail we’re given. We know virtually nothing about Ikku or Matun apart from these incidents; their names were recorded because the stories depended on them.

There’s also a story that reverses this pattern. Rabbi Ḥiyya bar Ashi’s wife overheard him praying to be protected from sexual temptation. She disguised herself and walked past him in the garden. When he asked who she was, she gave a false name: “I am Ḥaruta, returning from my day” (Kiddushin 81b).

Unlike the other examples, here it’s the woman herself who chooses the name; her actual name is never mentioned.

Names in documents

Another interesting source for women’s names is the Talmud’s legal discussions, particularly those dealing with divorce documents. Since a bill of divorce has to identify the parties correctly, the Talmud sometimes preserves women’s names simply because there was a question about their spelling.

For example, one woman’s name was Nefata, but the witnesses who prepared her bill of divorce wrote Tefata, using the wrong initial letter. As a result, the document was invalid (Gittin 63b). In other words, we know this woman’s name only because someone misspelled it.

These spelling issues are relevant to my research as well. The Babylonian Talmud (at least in the printed editions) doesn’t always use the spellings familiar from later sources. Queen Helene of Adiabene appears as Hilni (Nazir 19b), Queen Shelomzion as Shelzion (Shabbat 16b), and Beruria’s name is spelled with a final alef rather than the more familiar he.

For a project like mine, different spellings can make it look as though two references are to different people, when they’re actually referring to the same person. I’ve therefore tried to record the spelling found in the (printed) Talmud itself, alongside the more familiar form where relevant.

Names mentioned in passing

Many of the other women’s names appear only incidentally, in passages that aren’t really about them.

For example, Rav Naḥman once asked his daughter Donag to come and pour drinks for a guest. The guest objected, citing Shmuel’s ruling that one shouldn’t make use of a woman in this way (Kiddushin 70a). Donag’s name is likely Persian; it resembles the names of several Sasanian queens.

Similarly, Rabbi Ḥiyya’s twin daughters, Pazi and Tavi, are mentioned in just one sentence about his children (Yevamot 65b).

A woman named Me’oret is mentioned because she instructed her slave to carry out a dangerous medical treatment, which resulted in his death (Gittin 70a).

There are also some cases that require care when compiling a list like this. For instance, the names Ḥana and Marta appear among the sons of Abba bar Aḥa Karsela, even though both names look feminine. And Matun, mentioned earlier, wasn’t Jewish according to the story itself.

This is one reason I’ve found it important to check each name against its original passage, rather than relying on the name alone.

What can we learn from this?

Twenty-nine named Jewish women is a remarkably small number, especially compared to the many hundreds of named men in the Talmud. And without the stories that specifically depend on women’s names, the number would be smaller still.

I don’t think this list tells us very much on its own about women’s actual roles in rabbinic society. That’s a much larger subject, and one that’s been extensively studied. What I think it does tell us is something about the Talmud as a text, and about the circumstances in which women’s names were considered worth recording.

In many of these cases, a woman’s name appears because it’s relevant to a joke, a wordplay, a legal technicality, or a story involving mistaken identity. In other cases, it’s mentioned almost by chance, as a minor detail in a passage about something else.

So although the list is short, I think it’s an interesting illustration of how selective and often incidental the preservation of personal names can be in rabbinic literature.

I wanted a way to look up a place while reading and see its approximate position relative to other places, as a selected representative reference list.

The starting material was two place-name lists from my Talmud NLP Indexer repository: a gazetteer with 38 lines of biblical places mentioned in the Talmud, and a gazetteer of non-biblical places in the Talmud with 659. Bekiut already uses these lists for highlighting names in texts; extending them into a map required additional decisions about which names refer to the same place, which modern location to use, and how confidently to display a marker.

Screenshots:

Map:

List:

From names to locations

The source lists contain names and spelling variants, without coordinates. For this initial version, I selected places with usable modern identifications and recorded a coordinate source for each. The coordinates come from the cited Wikipedia articles, supplemented in some cases by separate historical references.

Among the 34 records, six have biblical-list membership and 30 have Talmudic-list membership; two belong to both.

What a marker means

I use three labels: “Established,” “Approximate,” and “Disputed.” For example, for Jericho, I use the point for Tell es-Sultan rather than the center of modern Jericho. For Shechem, the marker identifies Tell Balata rather than the center of Nablus. Rome and Athens have approximate city reference points.

Some names require an explicit choice between different places. The map selects Alexandria in Egypt, Caesarea Maritima, and Antioch on the Orontes.

The Babylonian centers required more caution. Sura, Pumbedita, and Nehardea have disputed markers with notes explaining the proposed locations. Meḥoza has an approximate identification with Veh-Ardashir.

For Nehardea, the notes record conflicting coordinates in the reference material. For Pumbedita, the marker is a reference point for the proposed vicinity of modern Fallujah.

Reading the map

The page combines a searchable list with an interactive map; selecting either a list item or a marker brings up the same details. Search accepts reviewed spelling variants and Hebrew aliases, with normalization for differences in vocalization, apostrophes, and hyphens.

Readers can filter the records by biblical or Talmudic list membership. Separate regional views move the map to the Land of Israel or Babylonia without changing the list.

I added place labels, a distance scale, and a visible identification legend. Labels appear where space permits; zooming changes which ones can be shown. An external Google Maps link opens the selected coordinates for comparison with a modern map.

The default background is “Landscape (color),” with other backgrounds available. All of them show modern geography. Roads, administrative boundaries, and background place names should be read accordingly.

The map is now linked from Bekiut’s footer and sitemap.

Appendix - Technical - Data and rendering

The reader is implemented in React and TypeScript. The curated records live in artifacts/chavrutai/src/lib/places.ts; the page is artifacts/chavrutai/src/pages/places.tsx. Each record includes a stable identifier, display name, search aliases, exact gazetteer spellings and memberships, coordinates, an identification, a certainty label, and source links.

The map uses Leaflet with MapTiler image tiles. The current implementation uses provider-rendered background labels, so a reader should not expect every background name to appear in English. Historical identifications and the application’s place labels are maintained separately from the basemap.

The source lists are bible_places_gazetteer.txt and talmud_toponyms_gazetteer.txt.

The William Davidson English edition of Talmud Bavli, based on Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz’s commentary, combines translation and explanation in a continuous text. This is often very helpful; a brief Talmudic statement about marriage, sacrifices, or the calendar may be almost impossible to understand without additional background.

But the format has a drawback; sometimes a short statement is followed by a long explanation, and the two are presented together. It’s easy to lose track of the original argument, especially when you’re trying to follow a sequence of questions and answers.

With the new Move Talmud Commentary to Footnotes feature, I’ve separated many of these explanatory passages from the main text. The notes are numbered and collapsed by default. Clicking a superscript opens the explanation and takes you to it, and a return link takes you back to where you were reading.1

The feature works with the edition’s existing text, after Bekiut’s usual processing, and simply changes how it’s displayed.

An example from Tractate Rosh Hashanah

In Rosh Hashanah 20b, section 12, the main text is just sixteen words:

Rava said: [There is a practical difference] between them [with regard to the hours before] midnight.2

But the explanation that follows is 201 words long. It goes through the scriptural derivations of R’ Yoḥanan and Reish Lakish, the significance of nightfall and midnight, and the connection to eating matza on Passover.

All of this is relevant; someone unfamiliar with the discussion may need the explanation to understand why midnight matters. But keeping it inline also makes it harder to see that Rava’s actual statement is quite short.

With the new feature, the main text is sixteen words, and the other 201 words appear in a footnote. The original section was 217 words in total. Nothing has been removed; I’ve just made it easier to distinguish the statement from its explanation.

This should be particularly useful for review. If you’ve already learned the passage, you can follow the argument without having to read through the explanatory material again.

Screenshots:

Bekiut:

Footnote collapsed (default):

Footnote opened:

Compare the presentation of the same section at Sefaria:3

Another example from Tractate Ketubot

A similar case appears in Ketubot 55b, section 1:

And [the halakha is also in accordance with his opinion] with regard to the teruma of the tithe from doubtfully tithed produce [demai].4

The ruling is 23 words long, while the accompanying explanation is 171 words. It explains what demai is, discusses a case where the separated portion becomes mixed back into the produce, and shows why asking the seller about tithes can make a legal and financial difference.

Again, the explanation is important; without it, many readers wouldn’t know what case the ruling is talking about. But it’s useful to be able to read the ruling itself, see how it fits with the surrounding discussion, and then open the explanation as needed.

Previously, the whole section appeared as 194 continuous words. Now the 23-word ruling remains in the main text, with the rest available in a note.

A second use for the feature: finding difficult passages

Once I’d developed the footnote extraction, I realized the notes might also be useful for a different kind of analysis: If a passage needs a particularly long explanation, that’s likely an indication that it’s unusually complex.

To explore this, I ran Bekiut’s new text-processing and footnote-extraction functions across Steinsaltz’s full ~80k sections of the Bavli. The result was ~30k notes. Their median length was 24 words; with 210 of them 100+ words long, and three of them 200+ words.

Long notes tend to occur where a brief statement assumes a lot of background knowledge or requires several steps of legal reasoning. For example, Yevamot 31b, section 6 has a 170-word note explaining dates on divorce and betrothal documents. To make sense of the statement, the commentary has to reconstruct a possible sequence of events and explain its consequences.

Of course, length isn’t a direct measure of difficulty. It also reflects editorial decisions, the assumed reader, and how the commentary is written. Some very difficult passages don’t have long notes. Still, I think it’s a useful heuristic for identifying more complex passages.5

Which tractates stand out?

I first compared tractates by the number of substantial notes per 1,000 sections (ie percentage), rather than simply counting notes (ie net). Otherwise, longer tractates would have an obvious advantage.6

Yevamot stands out most consistently. It has a high concentration of substantial notes, a large number of exceptionally long notes, and several clusters where lengthy explanations occur close together. Eruvin also stands out at the long end, with 21 notes of at least 100 words, compared with Yevamot’s 23.

Beitzah ranks quite high despite being relatively short. Pesachim, Gittin, and Nazir also have substantial concentrations of explanatory material.

Meilah and Chagigah are at the top of the table, but their smaller datasets, 509 and 732 sections respectively, make the figures more sensitive to a few individual passages. For comparison, Berakhot has 17.5 notes of at least 50 words per 1,000 sections, versus 63.3 in Yevamot. (Of course, that doesn’t mean that Yevamot is literally 3.6 times harder; it simply means that in the Steinsaltz edition, its explanations cross that threshold much more often.)

Some particularly complex stretches

I also looked for places where several long notes appeared close together. These are some of the strongest clusters I found. These clusters are based on notes of at least 50 words in the linked stretches. They’re not section-by-section measurements of complete chapters or sugyot; chapter assignments follow folio-level boundaries.

Yevamot, chapter 3: Arba’ah Achin

In Yevamot 28b–29b, there are twelve notes of at least 50 words, totaling 920 words. The discussion involves sisters, surviving brothers, levirate marriage, co-wives, betrothal, and ḥalitza. A change in one relationship can affect several other legal statuses.

Another cluster, 33a–34a, has seven substantial notes totaling 640 words. Here the issue is overlapping prohibitions and liability for multiple sin-offerings. It’s not enough to know which prohibitions apply; you also have to track when each one takes effect.7

Eruvin, chapter 4: Mi She’hotziuhu

Eruvin 49a–50a has twelve substantial notes totaling 844 words. It deals with eruv arrangements and questions of simultaneous or retroactive designation, alongside comparisons to tithes and animal tithes. Much of the difficulty comes from determining when a particular designation becomes legally effective.

Bava Kamma, chapter 1: Arba’ah Avot

Bava Kamma 7b–8b has eleven substantial notes totaling 927 words. These sections move between damages, loans, ketubah obligations, different grades of land, and the rights of creditors after property has changed hands. There are multiple parties and transactions to keep track of.

Beitzah, chapter 5: Mashilin

Beitzah 36b–37b has eleven substantial notes totaling 866 words. The discussion covers restrictions on Shabbat and festivals, preventing financial loss, eruv boundaries, and retroactive designation.

What makes the discussion complicated is that actions that look similar may be treated differently depending on ownership, intention, timing, or the particular prohibition involved.

Sanhedrin: Eilu Hen HaNechnakin

Sanhedrin 87a–88a has eleven substantial notes totaling 857 words. The discussion of the rebellious elder draws examples from purity law, court composition, consecration, sotah, and other areas.

Here, part of the difficulty is simply the range of background knowledge the discussion assumes.

Appendix - List of the twenty longest notes

1. Yevamot 2a:1

2. Yevamot 9b:4

3. Rosh Hashanah 20b:12

4. Ketubot 55b:1

5. Pesachim 53b:4

6. Yevamot 31b:6

7. Eruvin 71a:10

8. Yevamot 34a:3

9. Yevamot 40b:14

10. Yevamot 113a:14

11. Yevamot 10a:1

12. Beitzah 11b:8

13. Yoma 26b:12

14. Pesachim 18b:16

15. Makkot 15b:5

16. Sanhedrin 9b:1

17. Yevamot 34a:1

18. Yevamot 15a:12

19. Yoma 32a:3

20. Kiddushin 53b:7

Brown–Driver–Briggs covers biblical Hebrew, while Jastrow covers the language of the Targumim, the two Talmuds, and midrashic literature. Both dictionaries compress a substantial amount of information into their entries: A definition can include grammatical labels, references to manuscripts and ancient translations, citations of other scholars, and several levels of numbered or lettered subdivisions. My work concerns how that information is presented, especially opening up obscure abbreviations.

Keeping the abbreviation visible

I initially relied on inline expansion: replacing a recognized abbreviation with its full meaning. This is especially useful when the notation is very unfamiliar.

I have now added an alternative in which abbreviations remain visible. Hovering over or focusing on a recognized abbreviation shows its explanation; clicking or tapping keeps the explanation open.1 Readers who prefer the expanded text can select “Expand abbreviations inline.” I first introduced this arrangement in BDB, and then applied it to Jastrow.

The two modes serve different reading habits: Someone familiar with the dictionary can leave common forms alone and inspect an occasional unfamiliar reference. Someone using it less frequently can read the expanded version throughout (this is my personal preference). In Jastrow, the setting is retained when moving to another entry or reloading in the same browser tab.

I have continued adding mappings alongside this interface change. The public mapping tables2 list the expressions and their explanations.

Some replacements also modernize English: “thou art” becomes “you are,” and “proselyte” becomes “convert”.3 The explanation mode leaves the source expression visible.

Checking what an abbreviation means in context

Adding a mapping can introduce an error elsewhere if the same expression has another use. I have therefore been checking longer references and the text surrounding short forms.

Jastrow’s ch. provides an example. It can refer to Aramaic (“Chaldaic”), but in a clause like Sifra K’dosh. ch. III, Par. 2 it means “chapter.” I added a rule that recognizes the chapter meaning before an Arabic or Roman numeral. Elsewhere, the existing language explanation remains.

Longer expressions need to take precedence over their components. Matt. now maps to “Matot” (one of the weekly parashot) while Matt. K. retains “Matnot Kehunah” (a commentator on midrash). Similarly, Sm. maps to “Smith,” but Sm. Ant. identifies Smith’s “Dictionary of Antiquities”.

In an October review, I examined a sample of 191 distinct Jastrow entries returned by 132 source queries. I compared the forms used in those entries with the existing Jastrow mappings and with BDB’s mappings. That review produced 18 additions, including forms for “construct form,” “infinitive,” and “transposition.” It also identified cases where borrowing a BDB expansion would have been misleading.

Roman numerals present a related challenge. I extended Jastrow’s multi-letter numeral mappings through 49; for example: XXXII for 32. Single letters remain excluded from general conversion. A more specific rule handles I, before a numeric page reference, so I, 27a can become 1, 27a without changing an isolated I.

Navigating the entry

BDB’s longer entries can have several layers of subdivisions. I have worked on an outline that links to recognized verbal stems, numbered senses, lettered sections, and Greek submarkers. A floating outline remains accessible further down the page, and the main index can be collapsed.

I added a collapsible index to Jastrow as well. Its definition snippets now use opening italicized words rather than continuing into surrounding explanations and citations. The labels are extracted from source formatting; help locate a specific sense and provide an outline of the entry.

Paragraph spacing has required adjustment too. BDB offers optional additional splitting at semicolons. Jastrow offers additional breaks at dashes and certain citation boundaries. I reduced the excessive gaps in the latter display, then adjusted them again when the result became too compressed. The extra-splitting setting now persists alongside the abbreviation setting within the same tab.

I also corrected a problem with Jastrow’s index links: Clicking a section link could rerun the entry search and remove the section target from the address. The reader now distinguishes navigation within an entry from a new search. A direct link to a section waits for the entry to load before scrolling to it.

Recovering information that was being lost

Several fixes came from comparing what the reader displayed with what Sefaria supplied.

In BDB’s אָב², the occurrence count of 1,191 was missing. The source supplied it separately from the definition text, so formatting the definition alone could not recover it. I updated the reader to include occurrence metadata where available.

References to similarly spelled entries needed attention as well. Roman numerals and superscripts can distinguish different headwords or homographs. I improved the handling of those suffixes in both readers so that a reference can select the intended entry rather than simply return a group of similarly spelled results. Jastrow’s exact-entry addresses retain the stable entry identifier.

In BDB, I separated the displayed citation, its destination, and additional qualifiers. Expanding a biblical book name should preserve the words and numbers supplied alongside it. Where the displayed reference disagrees with the link metadata, retaining the source label leaves a discrepancy that still needs checking against the edition.

I also corrected the treatment of the Greek letter psi, ψ or Ψ. Standing alone in BDB, it can represent “Psalm(s)”; treating it as ordinary Greek produces an unwanted transliteration. The reader now recognizes the abbreviation while leaving the letter unchanged inside Greek words.

Some failures were less visible in the source. In Jastrow’s כָּבַשׁ, the period of &c. sits inside a separate italic tag. In כּוֹבֶד, fem is italicized while its period sits outside the tag. Both look like complete abbreviations to a reader, but the formatter was encountering separate pieces. I added normalization for these cases so the complete expression can be recognized without removing the surrounding emphasis.

Tests

I have added tests for the mappings and for cases where punctuation, formatting, or a longer reference affects the result, helping establish that an intended rule behaves consistently.

Screenshot, for example

Entry “Av (2)” :

Appendix - Technical

Implementation and sequence

The principal reader files are bdb.tsx and jastrow.tsx under artifacts/chavrutai/src/pages/. Shared formatting is in src/lib/dictionary-format.ts; Jastrow’s source normalization and index preparation are in src/lib/jastrow-presentation.ts. The two mapping dictionaries are JSON files under src/shared/data/lexicon-mappings/.

For Jastrow, I first normalize known malformed links and origin-note continuations. I then identify source headings, attach section identifiers, and apply optional paragraph breaks. Before abbreviation matching, I normalize known expressions split by emphasis markup. Abbreviation expansion, link conversion, and transliteration annotation follow. The index links point to identifiers retained in the rendered entry.

The abbreviation matcher isolates text from HTML tags so that replacements do not alter attributes or link destinations. It finds candidate matches using boundary checks, then resolves overlaps by position and length. At the same starting position, the longer match takes precedence. Context rules inspect following text before accepting particular expansions. The display mode determines whether a match becomes expanded text or an original expression with explanation metadata.

Challenges and resolutions

1. Overlapping references. Short forms can occur within longer citations. I test expressions such as Matt. K. and Sm. Ant. alongside their component mappings, including both display modes.

2. Ambiguous numerals and language labels. General numeral conversion excludes single letters. Separate rules recognize forms such as I, before a numeric page locator and ch. before an Arabic or Roman numeral.

3. Formatting inside abbreviations. HTML can separate an abbreviation from its period. Normalization joins recognized forms such as <i>fem</i>. before matching, while leaving ordinary italic prose and surrounding punctuation intact.

4. Missing information outside definitions. BDB occurrence counts may arrive as separate metadata. I include that metadata where available; I do not calculate new biblical occurrence counts.

5. Asynchronous section navigation. A section target may not exist when a direct URL first opens. The reader scrolls after the entry is rendered and avoids treating fragment-only navigation as a new search.

Verification and scope

I used selected source entries, the documented 191-entry Jastrow sample, and automated tests for mapping precedence, text boundaries, and formatting.

This past Tuesday to Thursday I attended the Israel Science Foundation workshop on AI and rabbinic literature, hosted by Hemdat Academic College in Sdot Negev. The main organizer, and the person who invited me, was Menachem Katz, and he did a great job of putting it all together. The format was sessions throughout the day, with shared meals in between, and everything was in English. It was an international gathering: people came from Scotland (Aberdeen), from elsewhere in Europe (e.g. Italy), and a good number from the US, especially the East Coast and New England.

I already wrote up my own talk separately, in “AI Coding Agents for Research in Rabbinic Literature: Recent Developments and Case Studies.” This post is about everything else: the people, the projects, and the conversations. The workshop revolved around AI, and specifically LLMs, and the many ways people are now putting them to work on rabbinic texts.

Faces, old and new

Part of the pleasure of a small workshop like this is the people. Some I knew from previous conferences, especially scholars from Bar-Ilan such as Leib Moscovitz and Michael Avraham. Others I had only ever corresponded with and never met in person: Michael Satlow, Joshua Waxman, and Moshe Pinchuk among them. It was great to finally meet them in real life.

It was also very nice to be able to talk shop with the people who are, like me, playing with the cutting-edge tools: agentic coding, building things with the latest models, and trying to keep on top of what is available from month to month. Joshua Waxman and Hillel Gershuni are in that category, as is Asaf Corem, who is essentially the CTO and technical lead of Menachem Katz’s Talmud Yerushalmi Digital Edition. I enjoyed getting to know him and getting into the more technical side of things.

Modernizing the Talmud page

One cluster of talks was especially close to my heart, because it overlaps with what I’ve been doing in Bekiut: projects that try, in different ways, to rebuild the Talmud as a digital, structured, linked object.

Joshua Waxman is someone who has always worked on projects similar to mine. In fact, he was working on them well before I was, and he was something of an inspiration for me. For a long time he has worked on the names of the Tannaim and Amoraim and the relationships between them, and on girsaot (manuscript variants) of Talmud Bavli. He is now bringing it all together in a new website called Girsology. It will reproduce the traditional tzurat ha-daf (the Bomberg/Vilna page layout), and on top of that, add full tagging of the text: knowledge graphs of the Talmudic sages, an “interaction graph” of who asks, objects to, or transmits in the name of whom, discourse roles for every statement in the sugya, and even a formal encoding of the logic of individual sugyot in Prolog, to see whether the argument actually “compiles.” He has also received permission to use the manuscript digitizations from Hachi Garsinan, including the Munich manuscript, which covers the whole Talmud.1

Michael Avraham and his group presented a project that is similar in many ways: also digitizing the tzurat ha-daf, also using LLMs to map out the logic of the sugya, and linking the different sugyot to each other. It looked very impressive.2 Waxman’s access to the Hachi Garsinan manuscripts is a significant addition to that.

Several talks were about tagging rabbinic corpora at scale:

• Michael Satlow (Brown) described using LLMs to turn classic rabbinic literature into RDF datasets, based on the Sefaria printed edition, and then running network analysis on the results.

• Hillel Gershuni and Asaf Corem presented the LLM tagging pipeline for the Yerushalmi Digital Edition. Gershuni gave the conceptual considerations, and Corem gave a clear, more technical breakdown of how the LLM tagging actually works.

• Binyamin Katzoff and his team presented Digital Mapping of Intellectual Affinities in the Literature of the Rishonim, which has a public website. They use LLMs to tag the names of authorities cited across medieval rabbinic literature, link them, and display the intellectual networks that result.

• Yair Furstenberg and his team presented the Local Law under Rome project. As a historian, Furstenberg is also tagging the Talmud, but specifically for its legal content, in order to connect it with the surrounding Greco-Roman legal traditions.

Search, manuscripts, and catalogues

Hillel Gershuni also presented his new Dicta Genizah Search, a platform for searching the new Genizah OCR transcriptions. I found it very impressive how much functionality he was able to build. Like me, he openly admits that he doesn’t come from a strong technical background; he comes from Talmud. And yet he has built a robust web application, with powerful search over the recent OCR transcriptions and a good manuscript display. This is exactly the shift I tried to describe in my own talk: a single scholar can now build what once required a team.

Yitzchack Gila of the National Library of Israel spoke about the history of the Institute of Microfilmed Hebrew Manuscripts: from its founding at Ben-Gurion’s initiative, through card catalogues and early computerization, to Ktiv and the large-scale OCR now under way in the MiDRASH project.

Nachum Dershowitz talked about more “traditional” AI (i.e., not specifically LLMs). He has been in this field for decades, and he spoke about his continuing work on paleography and on identifying joins between Genizah fragments. I found this one of the most interesting talks, because I think it is one of the few areas where AI, very broadly speaking, can currently do something that is inherently very difficult for humans to do.

Elyashiv Cherlow could not attend, so Hillel Gershuni presented on his behalf. His talk was on indexing and describing the manuscripts of the Talmud Yerushalmi (”From Fragment to Codex”), and it was quite impressive. Moshe Pinchuk presented the next stage of his Talmud Yerushalmi citation database, using LLMs to find “silent,” unattributed citations of the Yerushalmi in medieval literature. (He gave me a walkthrough of the database a few months ago; it is behind a paywall.) Aharon Shweka (with Nadav Aharoni) talked about text reuse in Geonic halakhic literature, comparing classical parallel-passage algorithms with newer tools.

Rabbi Hayyim Soloveitchik’s writings, authentic and spurious

The second day opened with a session on Rabbi Hayyim Soloveitchik, with Leib Moscovitz and Mayer Lichtenstein. (Note that the two projects, despite the shared subject, are unrelated.)

Moscovitz’s talk was especially interesting. He traced the term yesh laḥqor (”we may inquire”) through R. Hayyim’s writings: when it appears, what it means, and how its usage changes. He used it as a tool for separating the authentic R. Hayyim from the spurious. Along the way he discussed an interesting case of forgery: material that was supposedly from R. Hayyim’s notes, but was actually interpolated, with a lot of spurious additional writing, published in the 1990s.

Lichtenstein spoke about the evolution of the Brisker method, comparing R. Hayyim’s early Volozhin-era writings with his mature Ḥiddushei Rabbeinu Ḥayyim ha-Levi.3

Talmudic stories for distant reading

Itay Marienberg-Milikowsky gave a very interesting presentation on his project of preparing the Talmudic stories for so-called “distant reading,” with full tagging of them for emotions and various other features.4

The round tables

There were also broader discussions, mostly in the “round tables.” Nachum Dershowitz had a great sense of humor, and his takes struck me as very practical and realistic, quite close to my own, though probably a bit more pessimistic. Lynn Kaye spoke about the impact of AI on education, and how she deals with it as a teacher. That was a perspective we didn’t hear as much about elsewhere in the program, and I found it quite interesting.

Sderot

On October 7th, the participants went to Sderot for a commemoration and a tour of what happened there. It was very meaningful, and I’m glad I was able to take part.

Closing thoughts

What struck me most, looking back, is how much the field has converged. Almost everyone is working from the same base text (Sefaria), using LLMs for the same core tasks (tagging, linking, structuring), and building toward similar end products: networks, linked sugyot, a richer digital page. At the same time, the people doing some of the most interesting building were often individual scholars from a Talmud background, not engineering teams, which says a lot about where the tools now are. Thanks again to Menachem Katz and to Hemdat for a very well-organized workshop.

Thanks so much to Menachem and all the organizers for this workshop. As others have mentioned, it’s special to have it here in the south. Being in Sderot on October 7 was especially meaningful. Thanks for putting this all together.

We’ve heard a variety of perspectives on AI, including its use in education. I work in industry, and I’d like to focus on the cutting edge: recent developments beyond chatbots, and how I’ve been using them. In a sense, chatbots are already almost “traditional.”

A bit about me: I work in tech and have a graduate background in Talmud. My academic interests, which I pursue on the side, include onomastics, Talmudic Aggadah, literary structure, and digital editions. I have a blog with a few hundred posts, which sounds more impressive than it is because I use AI assistance and have developed a whole pipeline. Of course, that also involves curation, checking, and annotation.

I’m also developing a ‘vibe-coded’ website, using natural language to build a site that draws on texts from Sefaria and presents them in my own opinionated way. I’m trying to make these materials accessible to a wider audience. I also have academic papers and videos available online.

So, what has changed over the last year? I recently saw a comment on Hacker News, a major technology forum, arguing that AI, at least LLMs, isn’t really coming up with anything new. This was even after the release of GPT-6 and its impressive problem-solving results. I think there’s still something to that. This idea was also discussed at yesterday’s roundtable with Lynn, Nachum, and others. Nachum pointed out that other forms of AI can do certain things that LLMs cannot (such as manuscript joins, and dating and provenance of medieval scripts). But what LLMs are doing is making existing kinds of work much faster. They allow individuals and much smaller teams to work more quickly and iteratively. It’s not magic, but it’s a tremendous acceleration.

In a previous workshop I discussed translation, summarization, tagging, outlines, tables, and similar applications. I’d like to focus instead on the more recent capabilities.

Someone mentioned sub-agents earlier, and I know others here, including Hillel Gershuni and Josh Waxman, are also working at the cutting edge. I’ll discuss subagents, different platforms, where chatbots remain relevant, and a few recent case studies.

The division of labor is still basically the same: you have a question, you prompt the AI, and then you validate the result. But there’s another important step, especially with coding agents: using scripts. I don’t think we’ve talked about that enough at this workshop.

First, some terminology. These terms can be context-specific and sometimes complicated, but they’re important. An LLM, or “large language model,” is technically a subset of AI, although it’s what most people mean by ‘AI’ nowadays. Well-known examples include GPT and Claude. At the cutting edge, we now have GPT-6.1 and Claude Opus 5.5. For this talk, when I say ‘AI’, I generally mean LLMs.

A chatbot is the familiar interface where you ask a question and receive an answer, usually in a browser. What I want to discuss is the coding agent. Instead of just answering questions, it actually does things. It can work on your computer, write files, and produce outputs. It has vision capabilities, can correct its own errors, and can change course along the way. That greatly expands what’s possible.

Then there are orchestrators and sub-agents. The main agent, often called an orchestrator, can spin up sub-agents to handle specific tasks. I’ll return to that shortly.

There are other relevant terms, including context, tokens, and skills. I won’t go through each one now.

What have been the biggest changes? First, much better models. The current state of the art includes GPT-6.1 and Claude 5.5. Many people are still using free or weaker models, and that shapes their impression of AI. Hallucinations are still a problem, but grounding has improved substantially. There is a real gap between free and paid models, weaker and stronger models, and frontier models more generally.

Back to coding agents: tools that write files, run scripts, produce materials, and access the internet. Anthropic has Claude Code, and OpenAI has Codex. I subscribe to both, at around $20 a month each. These are among the main tools for agentic work.

What can they do? They write and execute scripts. A year ago, I would ask a chatbot something like, ‘Write me a script to count the words in this Talmud file.’ It would produce code, which I’d copy and paste somewhere else, troubleshoot, and run. Now I can give the task to a coding agent. It can download the file, write and run the script, find bugs, and fix them. It’s very powerful and very fast.

And it’s not limited to scripting. An agent can produce PDFs, Word documents, and slides like these. For the original draft of this presentation, I told Claude Opus 5.5 to look at my notes and produce a PowerPoint. It did (followed by many rounds of iteration). Earlier tools had some of these capabilities too, but they made far more mistakes. Now agents can use “vision” to inspect their output, iterate, and correct errors.

Even in industry, many people are still using chatbots, which is understandable: they’re much more accessible. But for the most powerful, cutting-edge work, I think agents are where it’s at.

Search and discovery have also improved. Hallucinations remain a problem, and all the usual caveats apply. But models are much better grounded and can search the internet and prepare research documents. I used to say that AI wasn’t very good for searching and discovering sources. At the time, I think that was true. Today it’s considerably better. It still makes mistakes and misunderstands things, but it can produce a very useful first draft.

Agents can access the internet, install external libraries, and even use a computer or browser to perform tasks. They can run code, research, retrieve data, and deploy projects. Over the last few months, I’ve built websites with GitHub Pages and published them on GitHub, with the agent doing much of the building and deployment autonomously. You can say, ‘Here’s what I want. Build this website,’ and it can do a remarkable amount of the work.

There’s also a category of third-party tools designed especially for building user-facing websites. For a new, ‘greenfield’ project, I personally use Replit. There’s also Base44, owned by the Israeli company Wix. These tools let you describe a website in natural language and have the platform build and deploy it.

They can be expensive, increasingly so as models grow more powerful and consume more tokens. But for people with the budget and interest, I recommend exploring them. They’ve continued to improve, with features like buying domains, deployment, and code review becoming much more accessible.

A word about chatbots. I still use them all the time for simple questions. But a year ago, there was considerable excitement, including on my part, about building custom chatbots into websites. I called my own website “ChavrutAI” because I envisioned including a chatbot that would act as a chavruta. Yesterday’s roundtable also discussed virtual rabbis or poskim, and Dicta has its Rav Dicta.

I’ve become less enthusiastic about that idea, and I think the industry has moved somewhat in the same direction. Custom website chatbots haven’t become nearly as widespread as many expected. I’ve pivoted away from that approach myself. Sefaria recently launched an AI feature that I think points in a better direction: using AI for search, discovery, and exploring sources, rather than asking it to act as your rabbi and tell you what to do. It’s less normative and more descriptive. Dicta also has a tool called Iluy, which I think is more in that direction.

Before the case studies, a few best practices for coding agents. I’ve been using them almost every day for the last year, so these observations come from experience.

Start with a sample. If you’re working with a huge text, like the Talmud or a manuscript, start small. By default, an agent might try to process the entire corpus, consuming all your tokens and budget. Tell it to begin with a few lines or a page, and set explicit limits.

Use Git commits. Git lets you take snapshots of a project, and GitHub lets you store them remotely. This not only preserves your work but also helps the agent manage a project over time.

Maintain documentation and skills. The concept resembles the ‘insight files’ Asaf mentioned. Essentially, you’re maintaining text files that explain what the project is, what the agent should know, and what has gone wrong previously. When a mistake occurs, you can tell the agent to update the documentation so that it can (hopefully) avoid repeating it.

Keep reusable scripts, and know when to restart. Especially for recurring tasks or long-term projects, scripts should be part of the project. And if an agent starts making serious mistakes, it can still be useful to begin a fresh session, perhaps with a stronger model. Ask for a handoff summary to give the next agent.

Monitor long-running tasks. Some people leave agents entirely alone, but I prefer to keep an eye on them. They’re extremely powerful and know far more than I do in many areas, but I can still contribute to managing the process. Agents don’t necessarily have a good sense of elapsed time. A script might run for ten minutes, and I’ll notice that something seems wrong. I can ask whether it’s processing correctly or whether there’s a more efficient approach. In principle, an agent can keep going for hours without getting tired.

Watch costs. The more powerful models can be expensive, and it’s easy to spend substantial amounts, especially when running large jobs. Most of us don’t have limitless budgets; I certainly don’t.

Review the whole project periodically. It’s worth asking the agent to step back, optimize the workflow, and clean things up.

Some older practices are becoming less important. I think formal ‘plan mode’ is a lot less relevant than it used to be. The same goes for prompt-engineering tricks. Clear instructions and good project documentation are definitely still important, but you no longer need as many special formulas to get useful results.

Here’s an example of a recent prompt: I tell the agent to start a new project in a folder and initialize Git. I also give it my current ideas while explicitly inviting it to propose better methods. Agents won’t always push back on your suggested approach unless you ask them to. Often, when given that freedom, they find methods I hadn’t considered.

Now, orchestrators and sub-agents. Think of an orchestrator as a team lead or chief of staff, with sub-agents doing the specific “tedious” tasks.

There are several advantages. First, cost: you can have a powerful model coordinate the work while sending some tasks, particularly vision tasks, to cheaper models such as Gemini or other alternatives. Second, speed: sub-agents can work in parallel. Third, cleaner context.

Context is somewhat like working memory. There’s only so much information a model can keep in its active context at once. If you distribute work among ten or twenty sub-agents, the main orchestrator has less detail to manage. Different agents can also specialize in different tasks.

The orchestrator, being a powerful model working at a higher level, can also check feasibility, test samples, evaluate accuracy, and decide whether the full project is worth undertaking.

Let me turn to a very recent project, from about two weeks ago, involving OCR and, more specifically, handwriting text recognition (HTR).

The source is a fourteenth-century Italian cursive Kabbalistic manuscript. I’ve been interested in it since graduate school. It’s an unpublished commentary on the Yeriah Gedolah, itself a difficult and obscure text. The original Yeriah Gedolah was published about twenty years ago, but this commentary has never been published.

For years I tried reading it myself. Later, with the development of AI, I tried Gemini and ChatGPT, but they struggled. Two weeks ago, I made by far the most progress I’ve ever made. The results may be approaching human-level transcription, though I’m not entirely sure yet.

I gave the manuscript to Claude Opus 5.5, and it discovered tools I hadn’t even known about. For example, Ktiv provides access to high-resolution manuscript images through IIIF, a standard for serving and structuring digital images. The agent could retrieve those images directly.

Claude then used Kraken and open models, including, I think, one called Sofer Mahir. It divided each page into smaller regions, deskewed the images, structured the material, and attempted line-by-line proofreading and correction.

It also used vision and distributed tasks among its own sub-agents, including less powerful agents within the Anthropic family. The work proceeded remarkably quickly.

But it was expensive. Multiple agents running in parallel, especially with vision, can consume a lot of tokens. I estimate I spent more than $150 in API costs, so I paused the project.

The system was also collaborating with Codex. That’s another advantage of Git: different agents can work on different aspects of the same project. Claude and its sub-agents handled transcription and the processing pipeline, while Codex and other models worked on translation and annotation. It’s a powerful workflow, but again, potentially expensive.

Another case study involves curation on my website: Jastrow and the Brown-Driver-Briggs lexicon (BDB), available on Sefaria. These are dense older reference works, full of abbreviations, archaic terminology, and scholarly citations. The risk is relatively low because I’m not changing the underlying text. Instead, I’m expanding abbreviations, mapping names, and making the material easier to navigate. I’ve blogged about this. BDB, in particular, is extremely hard for me to read in its original form because so much is abbreviated or unfamiliar. I built this interface with third-party tools and have been iterating on it continuously.

I also implemented transliteration. BDB contains Greek, Arabic, and other languages. In the nineteenth century, scholars often assumed readers could handle Greek, Arabic, Ge’ez, Syriac, and more. Today automated transliteration is relatively straightforward. I know a little Greek but no Arabic or Ge’ez, so this makes the material much more readable for me personally.

To conclude, as I said yesterday, I hope LLMs will eventually produce genuinely new chidushim. I don’t think they’re quite there yet. But they already allow an individual scholar like me to do work that would previously have required an entire team or would have taken much longer.

Q&A

Question: When you use Git to keep versions so you can return to earlier stages, what exactly are you saving? As someone who uses graphical interfaces, what would that look like?

EB: Most developers use GitHub. That’s what I use, and it’s free. I’m not a professional developer; I suppose I’m a vibe coder. But GitHub is the standard platform for this.

Git runs locally on your computer and takes snapshots of your work. On GitHub, you create what’s called a repository, which can hold a project. For my Yeriah Gedolah project, for example, I created a new repository, and I tell the agent to push snapshots containing the code. I don’t push everything: manuscript images are large and copyrighted, and I can retrieve them again when needed.

My code is public. These are open-access projects, and I’m not trying to monetize them. Publishing the code helps me, helps the agent, and makes the project accessible to others.

Audience member: The repository doesn’t have to be public. GitHub also offers private repositories, including free options, so you can keep some work private and make other parts public.

Audience member: Some people here understand all this technical language, but others, like me, don’t. You can put the presentation into a chatbot and ask it, step by step, what to do. It can guide you through opening a GitHub account and using these tools. You can use an agent as your personal computer adviser.

And whenever you don’t understand, stop it and say, ‘I didn’t understand a word of that. Please explain in plain English or Hebrew, without all the buzzwords.’ I do this all the time.

Another recommendation is code review. If Claude writes your code, ask a different agent, such as Codex, to review it. It will often find mistakes, and you can go back and forth between them.

Question: Sub-agents are new to me. How do you actually set them up? Do you tell the orchestrator how many to create? Do you specify their tasks? What’s the best strategy?

EB: You can simply say, ‘Spin up sub-agents.’ In my manuscript project, the agent did that on its own. For bigger projects, it will sometimes take the initiative. I’ve also seen this in third-party tools like Replit.

Audience member: You can just ask?

EB: Yes. You can ask, but it will often do it on its own.

Audience member: One major distinction is whether you’re using a tool in the browser or running it on your own computer. It may involve the same model provider, but it’s a different working environment.

EB: Right. For the full coding-agent experience, you generally need a coding-agent interface rather than a conventional chatbot, at least as far as I know.

Audience member: How would you recommend using these tools with a research team? I’m a scholar, and I don’t have the time or inclination to work with agents myself. I may now need to spend less on programmers and can put more resources toward humanist research assistants. What’s the most effective way to incorporate AI into a team?

EB: That’s a good question. I’ve generally worked independently, so I have less experience managing collaborative research projects.

I don’t know that I have special insight beyond the usual division of labor. Git and GitHub are designed for collaboration, and they can be used privately as well as publicly.

That collaborative model is increasingly relevant now that agents are becoming central to software workflows. The tools are improving at coordination not only among people, but between people and agents and among agents themselves. It’s worth exploring shared repositories, versioning, and clear divisions of responsibility.

Claude at work. (Screenshot of in-progress convo in Claude Code local coding agent for Windows.)

I have started publishing an experimental digital edition of Reuven Tzarfati’s Commentary on the Great Parchment: a medieval Hebrew kabbalistic commentary preserved in Jewish Theological Seminary MS 2367, folios 76b–97b. The project brings together manuscript transcription, English translation, annotation, and comparison with a surviving diagrammatic witness. You can read the edition online or explore the files and code on GitHub.

The feature I find especially exciting is Claude Opus 5.5’s role as an orchestrator of the transcription pipeline. In this project, an AI agent can work across the sequence from obtaining manuscript images to producing a corrected, line-numbered transcription. It can run specialized software, inspect the resulting images and text, write corrections into files, and return to a doubtful passage. That ability changes the practical scale of what I can attempt with a difficult Hebrew manuscript.

I wrote about Ha-Yeri‘ah ha-Gedolah in a 2019 Seforim Blog essay. The composition’s compressed language and unusual combinations of biblical images had interested me for years. This project gives me a way to work through the commentary systematically and make the accumulating results available for others to inspect.

The work belongs to early fourteenth-century Italian Kabbalah; the JTS copy was made in 1392. Tzarfati comments on Iggeret Sippurim, the “Epistle of Narratives,” a composition transmitted in the Great Parchment tradition. Its biblical phrases, names, and images are arranged within a kabbalistic diagram, an ilan, or tree. Rivers, patriarchs, animals, bodily parts, and commandments acquire positions and associations within the sefirotic structure. The commentary explains how to read those associations.

This makes the manuscript particularly interesting for Jewish digital humanities. Understanding it involves handwriting, biblical and rabbinic allusion, textual transmission, and visual arrangement. The edition puts the commentary into conversation with the Oxford Great Parchment, Bodleian Library MS Hunt. Add. E, accessible through the Ilanot Portal. That parchment is another witness to the underlying composition; the JTS manuscript supplies the commentary I am transcribing and translating.

What an AI orchestrator does

A transcription begins well before the first Hebrew word is typed. I need a sufficiently clear photograph, a reliable way to identify the page, and manageable views of its lines; I also need a way to preserve partial work and know which reading belongs to which part of the manuscript. These tasks can consume much of the time available for reading.

The project uses high-resolution images obtained through the National Library of Israel’s IIIF service. IIIF is a standard way for libraries to expose digitized images and their metadata. The download code assembles small image tiles into a full page. That gives the reading workflow access to detail that can be lost in a lower-resolution PDF export.

Next comes kraken, specialized software for recognizing handwritten text. A model for Italian Hebrew produces an initial machine reading; a layout model identifies text regions and line baselines; while yet another script uses that information to make enlarged, deskewed crops of individual lines. Long lines are split into overlapping right and left halves, so the reading can follow Hebrew’s direction while retaining enough detail to distinguish letters.

Claude then works through small batches of those crops alongside the machine reading: It corrects the Hebrew, retains scribal abbreviations, marks uncertain words, and saves numbered lines to a Markdown file for the folio. The instructions specify concrete conventions: [?] for a doubtful reading, <..> for illegible text, and bold for the phrases that the commentator quotes and explains. The next pass concentrates on unresolved readings and discrepancies with comparative evidence.

The impressive part is the coordination: The agent can connect an image-download script, a handwriting recognizer, a crop generator, a reading task, and a persistent transcription file. Each stage leaves something the next stage can use: When the reading raises a problem, the workflow can move back to the image or another witness. An agent operating in a working directory can help manage that entire sequence.

The repository records a division of labor: Claude Fable assembled the initial image and recognition pipeline; Claude Opus 5.5 continued the transcription and reviewed translations against manuscript images; Codex developed the translations, annotations, comparative apparatus, research survey, and reading site. The current experiment has grown through that collaboration, with instructions and corrections carried forward in the repository.

For me, this is the exciting possibility: I can give the system a sustained research task whose intermediate steps include both programming and close reading. The files preserve progress between sessions; the scripts make recurring operations repeatable. The folio instructions describe the scribe’s habits and the expected output. Together, these let the work advance page by page without rebuilding the procedure each time.

Corrections

One early lesson is that a convincing English translation can hide a bad Hebrew reading: Once a mistaken word has been rendered into grammatical prose, it becomes easier to miss. The workflow therefore includes comparison before translation and a return to the manuscript when the witnesses disagree.

Folio 80b provides a concrete example. An initial transcription read a phrase as lo qibbalti, “I did not receive.” A subsequent image recheck identified natnu lanu qabbalah, “they gave us a tradition.” That changes the apparent statement about the commentator’s access to inherited knowledge. The correction is recorded in the folio’s notes, alongside other rechecked phrases. The Oxford parallel helped identify where to look; the JTS photograph supplied the evidence for changing the JTS transcription.

The page’s red marks supplied another practical lesson. A red bar generally sits in the space above a quoted phrase. In a tightly cropped image, a bar at the bottom can belong to the following line. Misassigning it changes which words are treated as a lemma and which as commentary. The project instructions now explain that relationship, and the crop script looks for red ink above the baseline. Even then, the reader must inspect the image: a color flag does not establish a quotation’s boundaries.

These are useful examples of what orchestration enables. A difficulty encountered during reading can lead to a change in instructions or software, followed by another check of the text. The next folio benefits from that accumulated experience. The pipeline includes a feedback loop between image evidence, editorial decisions, and the tools that prepare the evidence.

What readers can use now

As of this draft, the repository’s publication registry lists sixteen translated folios, from 76b through 84a. The combined reader extends through 96b, and separate working transcription files reach 97b, the end of the commentary. These are different stages of completion. The transcriptions remain drafts; several translated pages explicitly record unresolved readings and marginal material still awaiting treatment.

The reading editions pair Hebrew and English by line, with notes and Oxford parallels where supplied. Their line numbers let a reader locate the passage being discussed. The Hebrew remains visible beside the translation, and uncertainty is carried into the English. This is useful for readers who want help entering the work and for specialists who want to question a proposed reading.

I am treating the project as an experimental edition of one manuscript witness. Claims about a complete critical text would require a fuller comparison of the commentary’s surviving witnesses. Busi’s 2004 edition of the underlying Iggeret Sippurim and the scholarship on kabbalistic diagrams provide essential context, but this project has not checked its readings against a supplied copy of Busi’s volume. The repository’s research survey explains the documentary layers and bibliography.

What I can offer now is a substantial, inspectable working edition and a record of how it is being made. The combination of a specialist handwriting recognizer, an agent that coordinates tools and visual reading, and a second system that develops and checks translations is already productive. Claude Opus 5.5’s orchestration makes this especially compelling as an experiment: the model helps carry a manuscript through a sequence of technical and scholarly tasks, with intermediate results that can be revisited.

For Jewish digital humanities, I see considerable scope in that arrangement. Many manuscripts require this combination of image preparation, difficult script, abbreviated Hebrew, recognizable sources, and unfamiliar argument. I hope the project will attract corrections, comparisons, and suggestions from readers who know these materials. The online edition is the easiest place to begin; the repository makes the method and its working results available alongside it.

Appendix 1 - Technical: from image to reading edition

Source and scope

The base witness is JTS MS 2367, fols. 76b–97b: 43 manuscript sides. The local repository contains 43 canonical per-folio transcription files. At the drafting snapshot, its translation manifest marks sixteen folios as published, ending at 84a; the combined reader ends at 96b. Separate transcription files reach 97b. These counts describe coverage, not validated reading accuracy. The Oxford Great Parchment supplies comparative lemmata (דיבור המתחיל) from the underlying composition and remains distinct from the JTS commentary.

Pipeline and review

1. Identify and retrieve. folio_fl_map.tsv maps folios to NLI image identifiers. iiif_tiles.py assembles 333-pixel tiles at the service’s native dimensions. download_all.py and download_from.py coordinate retrieval. Cached tiles support reuse; server rate limits may require reduced concurrency.

2. Recognize and segment. run_all_htr.py invokes kraken with Italian_01 recognition and the SoferMahir layout model. It writes machine readings and a logical-order derivative for this workflow. ALTO XML records line geometry.

3. Prepare visual evidence. alto_lines.py extracts enlarged, deskewed crops, separating main text and other regions and splitting long lines into overlapping halves. lines.tsv records geometry and red-ink flags. Crop identifiers anchor the transcription; machine-text numbering can differ and needs an explicit alignment note.

4. Read and correct. Claude reads crops alongside the machine output, following FOLIO_TASK.md: at most eight images per batch, immediate saving of corrected lines, preserved abbreviations, and explicit uncertainty. A second pass compares doubtful readings and lemmata. fetch_oxford.py supplies zone-based comparative text; discrepancies prompt JTS image rechecks.

5. Translate and present. Canonical Hebrew is stored in transcription/NNNx.md; generator-managed English, notes, and apparatus are stored in translations/Nx.md. build_translation.py imports the Hebrew from the transcription and creates staged reading pages. translation_manifest.json controls draft and published navigation. combine_transcriptions.py and build_site.py assemble the reader.

Manuscript credit: Courtesy of the Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary, The National Library of Israel. “Ktiv” Project, The National Library of Israel. The public project publishes an independent transcription and does not reproduce the manuscript photographs.

Appendix 2 - A second manuscript witness: collating Munich 311

The JTS manuscript is not the only copy of Tzarfati’s commentary. Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Cod. hebr. 311 preserves it on fols. 1a–33b, and the National Library of Israel serves its images through the same IIIF interface. After the JTS transcription reached the end of the commentary, Claude ran an experiment: could a second copy resolve the passages the JTS transcription had left uncertain?

The machine reading of Munich. Claude downloaded the relevant Munich folios and ran them through the same kraken pipeline. Layout detection was generally good, but recognition was weak. The Munich photographs are grey-scale microfilm scans at about a third of the JTS resolution. Aligned letter by letter against the JTS text of one section, the machine reading matched only 49% of the letters. On several pages, the line segmentation also broke into fragments. The conclusion was that the machine text can help locate the Munich passage that corresponds to a JTS line, but it cannot supply readings. Claude therefore read the Munich pages directly, as enlarged horizontal bands of about six lines, split into right and left halves, with close-ups where needed.

Claude did not transcribe Munich in full: It read Munich only where JTS was doubtful: at each word marked [?] and at each lemma. The first trial was the thirteenth narrative (JTS 93b–94b). The main effort then went to 90a–92a, the folios with the most uncertain readings (about 240 marked words). The pace was about 20–30 minutes per JTS folio. Munich’s scribe writes a clear, regular hand, and at many points where JTS is faint, blotted, or cramped, Munich is easy to read.

The Munich readings did not go straight into the edition; the project treats Munich as an independent witness. For each proposed change, Claude reopened the JTS line image and asked whether JTS itself supports the Munich reading. It applied about forty corrections this way; each one is recorded in a dated note with the old and new reading. About twenty-five points stayed unchanged, because the JTS image does not decide them. There the note records the Munich variant beside the retained JTS reading.

Results. Most of the corrections turned out to be errors in our first-pass draft rather than in the JTS scribe’s text. Munich showed what to look for; the JTS photograph then confirmed it. Several results change the sense:

• 92a:18–20. The draft read menorah (”lampstand”) three times, including in the lemma “Blessed are You, O Lord, who graciously grants knowledge…”. Munich reads Moshe, as does the Oxford parchment. On re-examination, the JTS scribe also wrote Moshe: our draft had misread a dotted abbreviation. The passage concerns Moses, whose name “is like his master’s name”.

• 90a:23. An unintelligible ובינים שמאת is u-ve-yom simhat libbo (”on the day of the gladness of his heart”). The commentary continues Song 3:11 after “the crown with which his mother crowned him”.

• 90b:4. The lemma is the talmudic principle “there is authority to the written text and authority to the transmitted text” (B. Sanhedrin 4a). This is exactly what the following lines explain.

• 92a:47–49. Readings taken as “body” and “soul” are the abbreviations for the attributes of mercy and judgment. In this reading, qanqan (”jug”, from “do not look at the jug”) splits into qan qan, so the sense changes.

Munich is not a better text in every respect: Its scribe skipped whole phrases twice in this stretch, jumping from one repeated word to its next occurrence. Because the Munich photographs show no red ink, only JTS marks where a quoted phrase begins and ends.

The experiment shows how the pipeline extends to a second witness: The same agent that transcribed JTS located the parallel passages, read a different hand from poorer images, and fed the results back into the base transcription. It also kept a written record of what each witness says. The next step would be a recognition model trained on a few hundred corrected Munich lines, which would make fuller collation cheaper. London, British Library Add. 27078 (dated 1573) is a third copy awaiting the same treatment.

The collation notes are in each folio’s transcription file, and the method is described in witnesses/munich311/PILOT.md in the repository.

“Everything an AI ever has or will do is presumably going to be within reach of a sufficiently dedicated human analyst or a large enough team of them.”

• “Roenxi,” Hacker News, September 20, 2026

I think this comment is an insightful way of thinking about the current state of AI. Current AI can’t do something that no human could possibly do (at present, in all cases, a sufficiently skilled and sufficiently large team of humans could do the same thing); the difference is cost, time, and scale. A research task that might previously have taken weeks, or required a programmer, a designer, and a research assistant, can increasingly be carried out by one researcher working with AI.

Over the last year, this has substantially changed how I use AI in my own work on rabbinic texts. In previous presentations of mine on AI and digital humanities, I discussed many of the major uses of large language models relevant to rabbinic research: translation, summarization, outlining, drafting, classification, and so on. Those uses remain valuable; but (in my opinion), the center of gravity has shifted from AI as a chatbot to AI as an agent.

From answers to work

The underlying models are substantially better. OpenAI’s current GPT-6 Astra, for example, is explicitly designed around computer use, browsing, software engineering, and other forms of extended work. Anthropic has made a similar progression with its Claude models (currently Claude Fable 5.1).

An even bigger practical change for me has been the emergence of agentic coding tools such as Claude Code and OpenAI’s Codex. Until the end of last year, I would ask a chatbot to write a Python script, copying the script into an editor, running it, discovering that it fails, copying the error back into the chatbot, and repeating the process. Now, I can give a local agent a task, and let it work through the cycle itself: It can inspect files, write code, run it, see what went wrong, modify the code, and rerun it.

For digital humanities, this is extremely powerful. For illustration, a task might be:2 take a corpus of the Talmud, identify references to biblical figures using a gazetteer, deal with ambiguous names and overlapping expressions, output a concordance, inspect the results for obvious errors, revise the matching logic, produce an HTML page or PDF presenting the results, and publish this publicly as a user-friendly Github Page.

All of these steps were far less accessible in the past.

Bekiut.com as an example

My largest current project is Bekiut.com, an open-source web interface for studying the Talmud and other major works.3 I began building it in August 2025; the public repository is now a substantial TypeScript application, alongside a separate repository containing corpora, gazetteers, concordances, and NLP scripts that I have developed for Talmudic research.

A year ago, building something like this would have seemed to me primarily like a software-development project; today, I think of the programming much more as an extension of the research itself: I can describe a feature in ordinary language, have an agent inspect the existing codebase, implement it, run the application, and iterate on the result.

The same applies to corpus work. I have used AI-assisted coding for name extraction, word counts, tagging, regular expressions, concordances, text alignment, and other forms of historically time-consuming text processing.

This extends even to presentation: An agent can write a research script and then build a webpage for publishing the results, or it can generate a long report, convert it into a designed PDF, inspect images of the rendered pages, notice layout problems, and revise them.

Better access to the “outside” (Internet) world

Another major improvement is access to external information. Older chatbots were notoriously unreliable at citations; they could give impressive-looking bibliographies containing books or articles that did not exist. AI search is now much more reliable. Current state-of-the-art systems can search the web, open sources, follow links, and synthesize information while retaining the connection between a claim and its source.

The same capability is useful for programming. An agent can figure out how an unfamiliar API works, inspect documentation, download a Python library, query a public dataset, or discover how a corpus is exposed through something like a Google Cloud bucket.4 I often still have to point it toward the right resource (thus, domain knowledge remains valuable); but once pointed in the right direction, it can typically work out the technical details itself.

Vibe coding

This change is also visible in the rise of what is now called “vibe coding”: building software primarily through natural-language instructions. Tools such as Replit, Lovable, and Wix’s Base44 have made this available to people who are not professional programmers.5

“Vibe coding” is sometimes used dismissively (and obviously it can produce bad software), but for researchers, the minimum level of technical expertise required to build a custom research tool has fallen dramatically. Previously, a humanities researcher might have had an idea for a specialized interface or corpus-analysis tool but no realistic way to build it without finding a technical collaborator; now the researcher can often simply start building.

The chatbot form-factor is now overrated

The chatbot remains the dominant public image of AI, presumably because chatting is technically and conceptually easy: You type a question; it types an answer. But I personally now believe that chatbots are one of the less interesting applications of AI, especially in niche scholarly domains. Early in the generative-AI boom (i.e. starting c. late 2022), there was considerable excitement about ideas such as an AI “rabbi,” an AI posek, or an AI chavruta.6

I have become considerably more skeptical of this framing. A general-purpose model producing expert answers is being asked to substitute for niche domain expertise, but gaps in the training data, as well as in the generalized “persona”, make this problematic. By contrast, using AI to help a search, organize, process, and inspect a corpus plays much more directly to its strengths.

Sefaria’s new Library Assistant is a good example. Sefaria describes it primarily as a tool for discovering and exploring its library: locating relevant sources, finding related texts, and producing ad-hoc translations; its answers are designed to be grounded in and linked back to the texts in the Sefaria corpus. I think this is a smart direction.

Dicta illustrates both approaches. Its “Rav Dicta” explicitly presents itself as a “virtual rabbi” designed to answer halakhic questions. Its newer Iluy product is framed more broadly as a tool for Torah study and source discovery, and Dicta explicitly states that Iluy is not a substitute for a rabbi or a halakhic ruling; this latter form strikes me as considerably more promising.

What has really changed

So if I had to summarize what changed over the last year, the important change is that AI systems can increasingly do sustained work: They can search, code, manipulate large corpora, use external tools, debug their own scripts, inspect their output, build interfaces, turn an experiment into a webpage or a PDF, and iterate through all these stages with much less human micromanagement than was possible even a year ago.

3

As an aside, note a number of recent updates to Bekiut, at the Changelog page, section “September 2026“ (I plan to post more in the future about some of these changes):

BDB: Abbreviation Expansions

Mishneh Torah: Paragraph Breaks (September 17)

• English paragraphs and list items now retain the translation’s original line breaks, including in Hilchot Repentance, without extra blank lines.

Talmud: Commentary in Section Notes (September 11)

• Complete standalone English commentary blocks now appear in collapsible notes below their section, including questions and linked clauses that finish with a full stop, question mark, or exclamation mark. Incomplete blocks and continuations of translation stay inline. Consecutive eligible commentary paragraphs stay together in one note.

• Each commentary block must contain at least 13 words in total; shorter paragraphs can join adjacent commentary in the same note. Section-opening paragraphs, blocks below the minimum, bold translation, and paragraphs mixing translation with commentary remain in the main text. Notes preserve paragraph breaks, formatting, and links.

• Prominent superscript references open the relevant note and scroll only as far as needed to bring it into view. Click the number in a note to return to its reference in the main text.

• Try it in Berakhot 2a, section 1.

For example of the new “Talmud: Commentary in Section Notes” feature, see screenshot, https://bekiut.com/talmud/Berakhot/2a#1:

Compare vs Sefaria, https://www.sefaria.org.il/Berakhot.2a.1 (set side-by-side, nikud off):

Rav Ḥisda - One should seek appeasement before three rows of three people - Job 33:27

(ואמר) רב חסדא:

וצריך לפייסו בשלש שורות של שלשה בני אדם,

שנאמר:

״ישור על אנשים

ויאמר: חטאתי

וישר העויתי

ולא שוה לי״.

Rav Ḥisda said:

And one must appease the one he has insulted with 3 rows of 3 people,

as it is stated:

“He comes [yashor] before men,

and says: I have sinned,

and perverted (העויתי) that which was right,

and it profited2 me not” (Job 33:27).3

R’ Yosei b. Ḥanina - One need ask forgiveness only three times - Genesis 50:17

(ואמר) רבי יוסי בר חנינא:

כל המבקש מטו מחבירו,

אל יבקש ממנו יותר משלש פעמים,

שנאמר:

״אנא, שא נא

ועתה, שא נא״.

R’ Yosei bar Ḥanina said:

Anyone who asks forgiveness of his friend should not ask more than 3 times,

as it is stated:

“Please (אנא), please (נא) forgive the transgression of your brothers and their sin, for they did evil to you.

And now, please forgive” (Genesis 50:17).4

If the offended person has died, one confesses before ten people at the grave

ואם מת ⁠—

מביא עשרה בני אדם

ומעמידן על קברו,

ואומר:

חטאתי לה׳ אלהי ישראל

ולפלוני שחבלתי בו.

And if the insulted friend dies before he can be appeased,

one brings 10 people,

and stands them at the grave of the insulted friend,

and says in front of them:

I have sinned against YHWH, the God of Israel,

and against so-and-so (פלוני) whom I wounded (חבלתי).

R’ Yirmeya and R’ Abba anecdote - R’ Yirmeya humbled himself to seek R’ Abba’s forgiveness

רבי ירמיה הוה ליה מילתא לרבי אבא בהדיה,

אזל איתיב אדשא דרבי אבא

The Talmud relates that

R’ Yirmeya insulted R’ Abba, causing the latter to have a complaint5 against him.

R’ Yirmeya went and sat at the threshold (דשא) of R’ Abba’s house

to beg him for forgiveness.

R’ Yirmeya was accidentally humiliated in the process

בהדי דשדיא אמתיה מיא,

מטא זרזיפי דמיא ארישא.

When R’ Abba’s maid poured out the dirty water from the house,

the stream of water landed on R’ Yirmeya’s head.

Psalms 113:7

אמר:

עשאוני כאשפה.

קרא אנפשיה:

״מאשפות ירים אביון״.

[R’ Yirmeya] said about himself:

They have made me into a trash heap (אשפה),

as they are pouring dirty water on me.

[R’ Yirmeya] recited this verse about himself:

“Who lifts up the needy out of the trash heaps (אשפות)” (Psalms 113:7).

R’ Abba then considered himself obliged to appease R’ Yirmeya - Proverbs 6:3

שמע רבי אבא

ונפיק לאפיה,

אמר ליה:

השתא צריכנא למיפק אדעתך,

דכתיב:

״לך התרפס

ורהב רעיך״.

R’ Abba heard what happened

and went out to greet [R’ Yirmeya].

R’ Abba said to [R’ Yirmeya]:

Now I must go out to appease you (למיפק אדעתך) for this insult,

as it is written:

“Go, humble yourself [hitrapes]

and urge your neighbor” (Proverbs 6:3).6

R’ Zeira anecdote - R’ Zeira made himself accessible to people who had wronged him, so they could easily apologize

רבי זירא כי הוה ליה מילתא בהדי איניש,

הוה חליף ותני לקמיה

וממצי ליה,

כי היכי דניתי וניפוק ליה מדעתיה.

It is related that

when R’ Zeira had a complaint (מילתא) against a person who insulted him,

he would pass (חליף) repeatedly (ותני) before him

and present himself7

so that the person could come and appease him.8

Rav and the butcher anecdote - Rav went personally to allow an offending butcher to reconcile before Yom Kippur

רב הוה ליה מילתא בהדי ההוא טבחא,

לא אתא לקמיה.

במעלי יומא דכפורי

אמר איהו:

איזיל אנא לפיוסי ליה.

It is further related that

Rav had a complaint against a certain butcher who insulted him.

[The butcher] did not come before him to apologize.

On Yom Kippur eve,

[Rav] said:

I will go and appease [the butcher].

Rav Huna predicts the butcher’s death

פגע ביה רב הונא,

אמר ליה: להיכא קא אזיל מר?

אמר ליה: לפיוסי לפלניא.

אמר: אזיל אבא למיקטל נפשא.

[Rav] met his student Rav Huna,

[Rav Huna] said to him: Where is my Master [=Rav] going?

[Rav] said to [Rav Huna]: I am going to appease so-and-so [=the butcher].

Rav Huna called Rav by his name and said: Abba is going to kill a person,

for surely that butcher will consequently die.

the butcher refused Rav’s advances

אזל וקם עילויה.

הוה יתיב וקא פלי רישא,

דלי עיניה וחזייה,

אמר ליה:

אבא את?

זיל, לית לי מילתא בהדך.

[Rav] went and stood by [the butcher].

Rav found the butcher sitting and splitting (פלי) the head of an animal.

[The butcher] raised his eyes and saw [Rav].

[The butcher] said to [Rav]:

Are you Abba?

Go, I have nothing to say to you.

and the butcher immediately died accidentally

בהדי דקא פלי רישא,

אישתמיט גרמא

ומחייה בקועיה וקטליה.

While [the butcher] was splitting the animal head,

one of the bones of the head flew out9

and struck him in the throat (קועיה) and killed him,

thereby fulfilling Rav Huna’s prediction.

Rav and R’ Ḥanina anecdote

רב הוה פסיק סידרא קמיה דרבי.

1. עייל אתא רבי חייא ⁠—

   1. הדר לרישא.

2. עייל בר קפרא ⁠—

   1. הדר לרישא.

3. אתא רבי שמעון ברבי ⁠—

   1. הדר לרישא.

The Talmud further relates:

Rav was reciting the Torah portion before R’ Yehuda HaNasi.

1. R’ Ḥiyya, Rav’s uncle and teacher, came in,

   1. whereupon Rav returned to the beginning of the portion and began to read it again.

2. Afterward, Bar-Kappara came in,

   1. and Rav returned to the beginning of the portion out of respect for bar Kappara.

3. Then R’ Shimon, son of R’ Yehuda HaNasi, came in,

   1. and he returned again to the beginning of the portion.

אתא רבי חנינא (בר) חמא,

אמר: כולי האי נהדר וניזיל?!

לא הדר.

איקפיד רבי חנינא

Then, R’ Ḥanina bar Ḥama came in,

and Rav said to himself: should I go back and read so many times?!

[Rav] did not return but continued from where he was.

R’ Ḥanina was offended

because Rav seemed to be indicating that R’ Ḥanina was less important than the others.

Rav sought R’ Ḥanina’s forgiveness for thirteen Yom Kippur eves, R’ Ḥanina refused his advances

אזל רב לגביה תליסר מעלי יומי דכפורי

ולא איפייס.

Rav went before [R’ Ḥanina] on Yom Kippur eve every year for 13 years to appease him,

but [R’ Ḥanina] would not be appeased.10

Appendix - The symbolism of experiencing seminal emission (‘Keri’) on Yom Kippur (Yoma 88a)

Yoma/88a#10 thru #11

Tanna before Rav Naḥman - One who experiences a (nocturnal) seminal emission on Yom Kippur has his sins forgiven

תני תנא קמיה דרב נחמן:

הרואה קרי ביום הכפורים ⁠—

עונותיו מחולין לו.

[...]

§ Apropos the halakhot of immersion for one who has had a seminal emission on Yom Kippur, the Talmud relates:

A tanna taught a baraita before Rav Naḥman:

With regard to one who sees a nocturnal emission of semen (קרי - keri) on Yom Kippur --

his sins are forgiven.

[...]

R’ Yishmael’s School - One who experiences a (nocturnal) seminal emission on Yom Kippur should fear throughout the year, but surviving the year signifies a share in the World-to-Come

תנא דבי רבי ישמעאל:

הרואה קרי ביום הכפורים ⁠—

ידאג כל השנה כולה,

The school of R’ Yishmael taught:

One who sees a nocturnal emission of semen on Yom Kippur --

should worry the whole year

that perhaps he was given a sign that he and his fast were rejected.

ואם עלתה לו שנה ⁠—

מובטח לו שהוא בן העולם הבא.

But if he survives the year --

he can be assured that his good deeds protected him and ensured for him a share in the World-to-Come.

Rav Naḥman bar Yitzḥak - The involuntary (nocturnal) emission is (paradoxically) viewed as a favorable sign: while everyone else is (sexually) deprived, he has been (sexually) satiated

אמר רב נחמן בר יצחק:

תדע,

שכל העולם כולו רעב

והוא שבע.

Rav Naḥman bar Yitzḥak said:

Know that it is so,

as the whole world is hungry due to refraining from sex,

and he is satiated11

Rav Dimi - an emission on Yom Kippur signifies long life and abundant progeny - Isaiah 53:10

כי אתא רב דימי אמר:

1. מפיש חיי

2. סגי

3. ומסגי.

When Rav Dimi came from Eretz Yisrael to Babylonia he said:

Seeing semen on Yom Kippur is a sign that one will

1. live a long life (מפיש חיי),

2. grow (סגי),

3. and raise others.12

It is bad for the wicked to escape punishment in this world - Proverbs 18:5

(See footnote.)1

״שאת פני רשע לא טוב״⁠ ⁠—

לא טוב להם לרשעים

שנושאין להם פנים בעולם הזה.

§ It was further taught:

“It is not good to respect (שאת פני) the person of the wicked” (Proverbs 18:5),

meaning, it is not good for wicked people

when they are respected (נושאין להם פנים) in this world

and are not punished for their sins.

... As with Ahab - I Kings 21:29

לא טוב לו לאחאב

שנשאו לו פנים בעולם הזה,

שנאמר:

״יען כי נכנע (אחאב מלפני)

לא אביא הרעה בימיו״.

For example:

it was not good for Ahab

that he was respected in this world,

as it is stated:

“Because he humbled himself before Me,

I will not bring the evil in his days” (I Kings 21:29),

and Ahab thereby lost his share in the World-to-Come.

Punishment in this world can benefit the righteous - Proverbs 18:5

״להטות צדיק במשפט״⁠ ⁠—

טוב להם לצדיקים

שאין נושאין להם פנים בעולם הזה.

The opposite is also true.

The complete verse states: “It is not good to respect the person of the wicked,

to turn aside the righteous in judgment” (Proverbs 18:5),

meaning:

It is good for the righteous

when they are not respected in this world

and are punished in this world for their sins.

... As with Moses - Numbers 20:12

טוב לו למשה

שלא נשאו לו פנים בעולם הזה,

שנאמר:

״יען לא האמנתם בי

להקדישני״,

הא אילו האמנתם בי ⁠—

עדיין לא הגיע זמנם ליפטר מן העולם.

For example:

it was good for Moses

that he was not respected in this world,

as it is stated:

“Because you did not believe in Me,

to sanctify Me” (Numbers 20:12).2

Had you believed in Me —

your time still would not have come to depart the world.

The merit of the righteous benefits descendants,

אשריהם לצדיקים,

לא דיין שהן זוכין,

אלא שמזכין

1. לבניהם

2. ולבני בניהם

3. עד סוף כל הדורות.

Fortunate are the righteous

because not only3 do they accumulate merit for themselves,

but they accumulate merit

1. for their children

2. and their children’s children

3. until the end of all generations;

As with Aaron’s sons - Leviticus 10:16

שכמה בנים היו לו לאהרן

שראויין לישרף כנדב ואביהוא,

שנאמר:

״הנותרים״,

אלא שעמד להם זכות אביהם.

as there were several sons of Aaron

who deserved to be burned like Nadav and Avihu,

as it is stated:

“The sons of Aaron who were left” (Leviticus 10:16),4

But the merit of their father [Aaron] protected them,

and they and their descendants were priests for all time.

In contrast, the guilt of the wicked burdens descendants

אוי להם לרשעים,

לא דיין שמחייבין עצמן,

אלא שמחייבין

1. לבניהם

2. ולבני בניהם

3. עד סוף כל הדורות.

On the other hand:

Woe to the wicked,

as not only do they render liable (מחייבין) themselves,

but they also render liable

1. their children

2. and children’s children

3. until the end of all generations.

As with Canaan

הרבה בנים היו לו לכנען

שראויין ליסמך כטבי עבדו של רבן גמליאל,

אלא שחובת אביהם גרמה להן.

For example:

Canaan had many children5

who deserved to be ordained as rabbis and instructors of the public due to their great stature in Torah study, like Tavi, the servant of Rabban Gamliel, who was famous for his wisdom;

but their father’s liability caused (גרמה) them6

One who brings merit to the public is protected from sin; one who causes the public to sin is impeded from repentance

(See footnote.)7

• כל המזכה את הרבים ⁠—

  • אין חטא בא על ידו,

• וכל המחטיא את הרבים ⁠—

  • כמעט אין מספיקין בידו לעשות תשובה.

[...]

Furthermore:

• Whoever accumulates merit for the public

  • will not have sin come to his hand, and God protects him from failing;

• but whoever causes the public to sin

  • has almost no ability to repent.

[...]

R’ Abbahu, responding to Rav Yosef bar Ḥavu - For interpersonal wrongdoing, judicial or interpersonal rectification is required; for sins against God, repentance and good deeds obtain forgiveness - I Samuel 2:25

עבירות שבין אדם למקום וכו׳.

רמי ליה רב יוסף בר חבו לרבי אבהו:

עבירות שבין אדם לחבירו אין יום הכפורים מכפר?

והא כתיב:

״אם יחטא איש לאיש

ופללו אלהים״

§ It was taught in the Mishnah:

Yom Kippur atones for sins committed against God, but does not atone for sins committed against another person.

Rav Yosef bar Ḥavu raised a contradiction before R’ Abbahu:

The Mishnah states that Yom Kippur does not atone for sins committed against a fellow person,

but isn’t it written:

“If one man sin against another,

God [Elohim] should judge him”.8 (I Samuel 2:25)

מאן אלהים?

דיינא.

[...]

R’ Abbahu answered Rav Yosef bar Ḥavu:

Who is Elohim mentioned in the verse?

It is referring to a judge [elohim] .9

[...]

R’ Yitzḥak - Even verbal injury requires appeasing the offended person

אמר רבי יצחק:

כל המקניט את חבירו,

אפילו בדברים ⁠—

צריך לפייסו,

§ R’ Yitzḥak said:

One who angers (מקניט) his friend,

even only verbally,

must appease him,

Prooftext - one should repay money when relevant or enlist others to help secure forgiveness - Proverbs 6:1–3

שנאמר:

״בני!

אם ערבת לרעך

תקעת לזר כפיך

נוקשת באמרי פיך

עשה זאת אפוא בני

והנצל

כי באת בכף רעך

לך התרפס

ורהב רעיך״.

as it is stated:

“My son!

if you have become a guarantor for your neighbor,

if you have struck your hands for a stranger,

you are snared by the words of your mouth…

Do this now, my son,

and deliver yourself,

seeing you have come into the hand of your neighbor.

Go, humble yourself10

and urge11 your neighbor” (Proverbs 6:1–3).

• אם ממון יש בידך ⁠—

  • התר לו פסת יד,

• ואם לאו ⁠—

  • הרבה עליו ריעים.

This verse should be understood as follows:

• If you have money that you owe him,

  • open the palm of12 your hand to your neighbor and pay the money that you owe;

• and if not, if you have sinned against him verbally,

  • increase13 friends for him, i.e., send many people as your messengers to ask him for forgiveness.

R’ Yosei b. Yehuda - God forgives repeated sins three times; on the fourth offense, forgiveness is withheld

תניא,

רבי יוסי בר יהודה אומר:

1. אדם עובר עבירה פעם ראשונה ⁠—

   1. מוחלין לו,

2. שניה ⁠—

   1. מוחלין לו,

3. שלישית ⁠—

   1. מוחלין לו,

4. רביעית ⁠—

   1. אין מוחלין לו

§ It was taught in a baraita that

R’ Yosei bar Yehuda says:

1. When a person commits a transgression the 1st time,

   1. he is forgiven;

2. a 2nd time,

   1. he is forgiven;

3. a 3rd time,

   1. he is forgiven;

4. but the 4th time,

   1. he is not forgiven,

Prooftext - Amos 2:6; Job 33:29

שנאמר:

״כה אמר ה׳:

על שלשה פשעי ישראל

ועל ארבעה לא אשיבנו״,

(ונאמר:)

״הן כל אלה יפעל אל פעמים שלש עם גבר״.

[...]

as it is stated:

“Thus said YHWH:

For 3 transgressions of Israel,

[but] for 4 I will not reverse it” (Amos 2:6).

And it says:

“All these things does God do twice or 3 times with a man” (Job 33:29).

[...]

Baraita - A sin confessed and not repeated need not be confessed again on the next Yom Kippur

תנו רבנן:

• עבירות שהתודה עליהן יום הכפורים זה --

  • לא יתודה עליהן יום הכפורים אחר.

• ואם שנה בהן ⁠—

  • צריך להתודות יום הכפורים אחר.

§ A baraita states in the Tosefta:

• With regard to transgressions that one confessed (התודה) on this Yom Kippur --

  • he should not confess them on another Yom Kippur, since he has already been forgiven.

• But if he repeated (שנה) those same transgressions during the year,

  • he must confess them again on another Yom Kippur.

Repeating confession unnecessarily resembles a dog returning to its vomit - Proverbs 26:11

ואם לא שנה בהן,

וחזר והתודה ⁠—

עליהן עליו הכתוב אומר:

״ככלב שב על קיאו

כסיל שונה באולתו״.

And if he did not repeat them

but did confess them again,

about him the verse states:

“As a dog that returns to its vomit,

so is a fool who repeats his folly” (Proverbs 26:11),

since it is inappropriate to go back and mention one’s earlier sins.

R’ Eliezer ben Ya’akov - Re-confessing earlier sins is praiseworthy, because one should keep awareness of one’s sins - Psalms 51:5

רבי אליעזר בן יעקב אומר:

כל שכן שהוא משובח,

שנאמר:

״כי פשעי אני אדע

וחטאתי נגדי תמיד״.

[...]

R’ Eliezer ben Ya’akov says:

If one confesses in subsequent years, all the more so is he praiseworthy,

as he remembers his earlier sins and is thereby humbled, as it is stated:

“For I know my transgressions;

and my sin is ever before me” (Psalms 51:5).

[...]

R’ Yehuda ben Bava - Confession should specify the particular sin - Exodus 32:31

וצריך לפרוט את החטא,

שנאמר:

״אנא חטא העם הזה חטאה גדולה

ויעשו להם אלהי זהב״,

דברי רבי יהודה בן בבא.

During confession, one must detail the sin he committed and not suffice with a general admission of sin,

as it is stated:

“And Moses returned to YHWH and said:

Please, this people have sinned a great sin,

and have made themselves a god of gold” (Exodus 32:31);

this is the statement of R’ Yehuda ben Bava.

R’ Akiva - One need not specify the sin in confession - Psalms 32:1

רבי עקיבא אומר:

״אשרי נשוי פשע

כסוי חטאה״.

R’ Akiva says that the verse states:

“Fortunate is he whose transgression is forgiven,

whose sin is hidden” (Psalms 32:1),

which teaches that one need not detail his sins.

R’ Yannai - Moses’ mention of the Golden Calf was not confession-detailing but an argument that Israel’s abundance of gold helped cause the sin - Exodus 32:31

אלא מהו שאמר משה:

״ויעשו להם אלהי זהב״?

כדרבי ינאי.

דאמר רבי ינאי:

אמר משה לפני הקדוש ברוך הוא:

רבונו של עולם!

כסף וזהב שהרבית להם לישראל

עד שאמרו די ⁠—

גרם להם שיעשו אלהי זהב.

But what is the meaning of that which Moses said:

“And have made themselves a god of gold” (Exodus 32:31)?

It should be understood in accordance with the statement of R’ Yannai,

as R’ Yannai said:

Moses said before God:

God!

it is the silver and gold that you gave to the Jewish people in abundance,

until they said: “Enough,”

which caused them to make a god of gold.1

Moses wanted his sin publicized, whereas David wanted his hidden - Numbers 20:12

שני פרנסים טובים עמדו להם לישראל:

1. משה

2. ודוד.

It is said that two good leaders (פרנסים) arose for the Jewish people:

1. Moses

2. and David.

משה אמר:

יכתב סורחני,

שנאמר:

״יען לא האמנתם בי להקדישני״,

Moses said:

Let my disgrace2 be written, i.e., may the sin I committed be written explicitly,

as it is stated:

“Because you did not believe in Me,

to sanctify Me” (Numbers 20:12).

David - Psalms 32:1

דוד אמר:

אל יכתב סורחני.

שנאמר:

״אשרי נשוי פשע

כסוי חטאה״.

In contrast, David said:

Let my disgrace not be written,3

as it is stated:

“Fortunate is he whose transgression is forgiven,

whose sin is hidden” (Psalms 32:1).

Moses’ publicity prevented people from assuming he committed more serious sins

משל דמשה ודוד למה הדבר דומה?

לשתי נשים שלקו בבית דין:

• אחת קלקלה,

• ואחת אכלה פגי שביעית.

The Talmud explains:

A parable with regard to Moses and David shows to what this may be compared:

It may be compared to two women4 who were flogged in court for their sins:

• One of them

  • Sinned,5

• and one

  • ate unripe figs (פגי) of the Sabbatical Year although they are forbidden.

אמרה להן אותה שאכלה פגי שביעית:

בבקשה מכם!

הודיעו על מה היא לוקה,

שלא יאמרו:

על מה שזו לוקה ⁠—

זו לוקה.

The woman who ate the unripe figs of the Sabbatical Year said to the court:

Please!

publicize the sin for which I am being flogged,

so that people will not say that

what that woman is being flogged for --

is also what this woman is being flogged for.

הביאו פגי שביעית

ותלו בצוארה,

והיו מכריזין לפניה ואומרין:

על עסקי שביעית היא לוקה.

They brought unripe figs of the Sabbatical Year,

and hung them around her neck,

and announced before her, saying:

She is receiving lashes on account of the Sabbatical Year.6

Hypocrites should be exposed to prevent desecration of God’s name

מפרסמין את החנפין

מפני חילול השם,

Furthermore, they said:

One exposes7 the hypocrites8

due to the desecration of God’s name,

so others will not think that they are truly righteous and that their deeds bear imitating,

Prooftext - repentance can avert punishment even after a decree has been issued - Ezekiel 3:20

שנאמר:

״ובשוב צדיק מצדקו

ועשה עול

ונתתי מכשול לפניו״.

תשובת המוחלטין מעכבת הפורענות,

ואף על פי שנחתם עליו גזר דין של פורענות.

as it is stated:

“When a righteous man turns (שוב) from his righteousness

and commits iniquity,

I will lay a stumbling block before him” (Ezekiel 3:20).9

The repentance of utterly (מוחלטין) wicked people prevents punishment (פורענות) from coming upon them.

And although the sentence of judgment has already been signed against them for punishment,

their repentance prevents them from being punished.

Prosperity can ruin the wicked, and political authority endangers its holder

(See footnote.)10

1. שלות רשעים --

   1. סופה תקלה,

2. והרשות --

   1. מקברת את בעליה,

3. ערום נכנס לה, וערום יצא ממנה,

4. ולואי שתהא יציאה כביאה.

1. The tranquility of the wicked --

   1. is ultimately their destruction, as in their contentment they sit and think about forbidden matters.

2. And political authority (רשות) --

   1. buries one who owns it.

3. He was naked when he entered the world, and he will be naked when he leaves it,

4. and if only his exit would be like his entrance, without sin and added iniquity.

Rav - A judge should approach adjudication with fear, recognizing the danger of wrongful judgment and lack of personal gain

רב כי הוה נפיק למידן דינא

אמר הכי:

1. בצבו נפשיה, לקטלא נפיק,

2. וצבו ביתיה לית הוא עביד,

3. וריקן לביתיה אזיל,

4. ולואי שתהא ביאה כיציאה.

The Talmud relates:

When Rav would leave his home to go to court to judge cases,

he would say this of himself:

1. Of his own will,11 he goes to die, because a judge who misjudges a case is liable to death at the hand of Heaven;

2. and he does not fulfill the will of his household

3. and he goes empty-handed to his household, because a judge does not receive a salary;

4. and if only his entrance would be like his exit, without sin or transgression.

Rava - Repeated Rav’s warning about judicial office

רבא כי הוה נפיק לדינא

אמר הכי:

1. בצבו נפשיה לקטלא נפיק,

2. וצבו ביתיה לית הוא עביד,

3. וריקן לביתיה אזיל,

4. ולואי שתהא ביאה כיציאה.

When Rava would go to judge,

he would say this of himself:

1. Of his own will, he goes to die;

2. and he does not fulfill the will of his household,

3. and he goes empty-handed to his household;

4. and if only his entrance would be like his exit.

... and when Rava honored by crowds, he reminded himself of the transience of power - Job 20:6–7

(See footnote.)12

וכי הוי חזי אמבוהא אבתריה,

אמר:

1. ״אם יעלה לשמים שיאו

2. וראשו לעב יגיע.

3. כגללו לנצח יאבד

4. רואיו יאמרו: איו?״.