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The Sages of the Talmud

Every sage the Talmud Bavli names, read off the Bavli itself: 473 of them, from the Pairs to the Savoraim, with the era and generation each belongs to, how often the Talmud writes his name, and the gematria of that name under all seven methods.

The Tannaim — the sages of the Mishnah, whose rulings it records (c. 10–200 CE).

9 of 473 sages — in the order they first stand in the printed Shas, Berachot forward

What a count here counts. A mention is an occurrence of a name-form listed in the roster, found by longest match across the whole roster. It is not a scholarly attribution census.

  • A sugya that argues about Rabbi Akiva's position for half a page without writing his name again counts once, not once per argument.
  • A ruling given anonymously that the tradition ascribes to a particular sage counts for nobody — this index reads the letters on the page, not the attribution literature.
  • Where a form is one more than one sage answers to, nobody is credited: 2,270 such occurrences are recorded and left uncounted rather than guessed.

78,565 occurrences are credited across the Shas. 2,270 more are recorded and credited to nobody, because the form standing there is one more than one sage answers to, and 203 are titles the roster does not yet hold a name for — a to-do list, not a silent loss. The roster’s names, generations and teacher–student lines follow the traditional Jewish reference works — סדר תנאים ואמוראים (Seder Tannaim v'Amoraim) · אגרת רב שרירא גאון (Iggeret Rav Sherira Gaon) · סדר הדורות (Seder HaDorot, R. Yechiel Heilprin) · יוחסין (Sefer Yuchasin, R. Avraham Zacuto) — together with the Bavli’s own usage as counted in this corpus.

Talmud Bavli, Wikisource edition, via Sefaria — CC BY-SA 4.0. The gematria is the value of a NAME, computed by the same engine that runs every search; not one word of the Talmud is indexed, searched or valued anywhere in this app.