Mi vaMi - A Graph Database of the Babylonian Talmud

When Moses asked Pharaoh to allow the ancient Hebrews to leave Egypt for a three-day religious festival, Pharaoh requested some clarification ( Exodus 10:8). He asked מִ֥י וָמִ֖י הַהֹלְכִֽים, "who precisely is going?"

The Mi vaMi project intends to apply this question to the Babylonian Talmud. When studying the Talmud, it is certainly important to know the give-and-take, the arguments and rejoinders, and the theories and proofs. However, it is also often critical to know just who is engaging in discourse. Is it Abaye and Rava, or Abaye and Rabba? How are the participants in the discourse related to one another? Are they, for instance, student and teacher, colleagues, or opposing heads of the academies at Sura and Pumpedita? Are they in the same generation, or are they separated by decades or centuries?

The impact of such knowledge extends to practical decided law. (For example, the law will be decided like Rava over his collegue Abaye, but like Abaye over his teacher Rabba.) It can aid in our understanding of the historical development of the sugya. (For instance, the Revadim academic approach to Talmud study examines the sugya as it existed and was understood in different time slices, in different generations of Tannaim and Amoraim.) It can aid in our understanding of the discourse itself. (For instance, we might see a dispute between two Amoraim about some point of law, and that in subsequent generations, students align themselves to the positions of their teachers.) We are brief here, but elaboration on each of these points will be offered elsewhere.

Current Features

There are several aspects of Mi vaMi in stages of development, and have not been integrated into our website. The following features are currently available:

• Tanna and Amora identification - a Tanna or an Amora appears in either the Hebrew/Aramaic or English text, we highlight that text. The color corresponds to the scholastic generation. Tannaim are distinguished by their Courier New font. Hovering over the highlighted text will yield a popup text with further information.
• Student-Teacher graphs - On the right-hand side of the screen is a graph showing all Tannaim and Amoraim who appeared on the page. The nodes of the graph are the Tannaim and Amoraim, and the edges represent scholastic relationships between them. Sometimes, they are directly related. Other times, they are related by a shared teacher, who may or may not appear in the current page of Talmud. Nodes with a black outline appear on the Talmudic page; those without outlines are the shared teachers.
• Local Interactions Graph Instead of relying upon manually coded teacher-student relationships, we have written programs to analyze the Talmudic text and extract the relationships. For example, in Bava Batra, when we encounter אמר רבא אמר רב נחמן אמר שמואל, we can extract that Rava is citing Rav Nachman, that Rav Nachman is citing Shmuel, and that Rava is indirectly citing Shmuel. We look for all sorts of scholastic relationships, such as joint statements, objection, support, explaining the reasons for someone's opinion, and so on. While quite a number of extractors have been built, many of the interactions are still being integrated into the website site.
• Global Interactions Graph The local interaction graph is often quite sparse on a given page of Talmud. Here we present the relationship between the various rabbis globally across the entire Talmud, and this can provide insight even where there are no explicit discourse verbs between a pair of rabbis on the particular page.
• And more to come!Other graphs, other types of analysis and highlighting. This is a project under very active development

Thanks

We are grateful for the technical and scholarly resources made available for free and open-source by Sefaria. We have made use of their database, which contains their Hebrew/Aramaic/English talmud text. The hand-coded knowledge about generations of Tannaim and Amoraim, which generation they belong to, and who is a student of whom (from which we build the first graph) is drawn from tables in Sefaria's database.

The incredible resource of the aligned Hebrew/English Talmudic text, which we pull from Sefaria, is the The William Davidson digital edition of the Koren Noé Talmud, with commentary by Rabbi Adin Even-Israel Steinsaltz. It was released with a CC BY-NC license by Koren Publishers.

Contact us

Questions? Comments? You can contact me at joshua.waxman@yu.edu