Comet, Perplexed by Rabbi Eleazar (full article)
Often, knowing how Talmudic Sages relate to one another can transform our understanding of a sugya. Who is an Amora vs. a Tanna, whether Sages lived in the same country or era, are all important to understanding the dynamics of discourse. I think this should be taught in schools as an essential gemara-reading skill, though where it is lacking, I try to teach this to my kids.
On Gittin 22a, Rabbi Eleazar asserts that the Mishnah’s author is Rabbi Eleazar. How could Rabbi Eleazar say this about himself? In a shiur on the sugya, Rav Herschel Schachter related, I remember once, I was learning bechavrusa with someone; my neighbor was a young rabbi in Brooklyn who had semicha from Rav Moshe Feinstein; so we were learning Kesubos together. So he had a kasha on what we were learning, there was a kasha Rabbi Eleazar on Rabbi Eleazar. So I said, please show me where. So one was Rabbi Eleazar in the Mishnah, and one was Rabbi Eleazar in the Gemara. I said, “This is a Tanna! This is Rabbi Eleazar ben Shamua. And this, Rabbi Eleazar [is] Rabbi Eleazar the Amora; this is ben Pedas.” He said that this was ... maskilish.”
Rav Schachter continued, “If it’s the Mishnah, it’s a Tanna, a different person, not the same. It’s a Rashi later, Rashi says who the different Rabbi Eleazars are. The Amora is Rabbi Eleazar ben Pedas, the talmid of Rabbi Yochanan. ... And Rabbi Eleazar the Tanna is a different person, so you can’t ask a kasha one on the other.”
Indeed, it’s not maskilish, and knowing who Sages are is a critical skill. (In an earlier draft of this article, I gave an example of a recent Torah article someone people erred in this regard, by confusing scholastic generations and having Tannaim quote Amoraim. Correcting our understanding of who’s who has downstream effects on the dynamics of discourse and the eventual pesak halacha. I’d rather not name names, and it’s really one random example I could offer of many, so please take my word that this can have drastic impact. Instead, we’ll focus on Zevachim 63a, Sunday’s daf, where such generational confusion is possible, and how we might detect such issues.)
On Zevachim 63a, Rabbi Eleazar appears. He explains the anonymous Mishnah, and Rabbi Yirmeyah objects from a brayta, in which Ben Beteira appears. Then, the gemara declares that either Rabbi Yimreyah raised a question and answered it, or else Rabbi Akiva said he would explain the solution to Rabbi Yirmeya bar Tachlifa.
Comet and Talmudic Biography
Since the TechRav recently wrote in the Jewish Link about how the Atlas browser could transform Torah learning (“The Atlas Revolution: Turning Every Tab Into Torah”, Oct 30, 2025), I thought I’d see how well it understood the players in the sugya. Alas, even after force-upgrading my iMac’s operating system, I wasn’t able to run that browser because it lacked a Silicon chip. So, I instead turned to Perplexity’s Comet, which is another Agentic browser, and asked it to tell me which Sages interacted on the current page.
I was less than impressed. Comet wrongly identified Rabbi Eleazar as the Tanna, Rabbi Elezar ben Shamua, who argued with the Amora, Rabbi Yirmeyah. “So, while Rabbi Yirmeya is quoting or challenging the position of Rabbi Eleazar ben Shamua on Zevachim 63a, they are from different generations… This is a classic example of an Amora discussing or analyzing the rulings of a Tanna.” Further, it claimed that Rabbi Akiva, a Tanna, was speaking to Rabbi Yirmeyah, missing that he spoke to Rabbi Yirmeyah bar Tachlifa.
When pressed about how a Tanna, Rabbi Akiva, could speak to an Amora, it explained that “it is not historically possible for Rabbi Akiva (Tanna) to have addressed Rabbi Yirmeya (Amora) directly. Any such wording in the Gemara is simply a method to display the chain of transmission or the use of Rabbi Akiva’s words in later discussion.”
That’s wrong. Rabbi Yirmiyah bar Tachlifa was a separate person from Rav Yirmeyah, though also a third-generation Amora. The Tanna, Rabbi Akiva, didn’t speak to him; “Akiva” is a printing error for Rabbi Yaakov which first occurs in the Venice printing, and this formula has with Rabbi Yaakov explaining to Rabbi Yirmeyah bar Tachlifa in the four other times it occurs, including twice in Zevachim, and in the parallel to our sugya in Menachot 8b.
ChatGPT Atlas could almost surely perform better; certainly a standalone session with GPT-5 Thinking model hit most of these points. Still, I like to subject LLMs to rigorous tests, and they often don’t pass, especially when it comes to edge cases or esoteric and specialized knowledge, as may often be required for understanding Talmud.
How To Check Variants
There are a few ways to know that it wasn’t Rabbi Akiva talking to another Tanna (whose title is after all “Rabbi”), aside from bekiut familiarity to recognize the common interaction. Foremost is that his words, אַסְבְּרַהּ לָךְ: לֹא נִצְרְכָא אֶלָּא לְהַכְשִׁיר כׇּל הָעֲזָרָה כּוּלָּהּ, are all Aramaic, whereas we typically expect Tannaim to speak in Hebrew.
Second, our Vilna-print gemaras have a Shita Mekubetzet commentary, by Rabbi Betzalel Ashkenazi, who lived in the Land of Israel under Ottoman rule. He was born in 1520 and died in 1592. Just like the Bach, Rabbi Yoel Sirkes (1561 - 1640), he wrote commentary in the actual pages of his gemara – though not the Vilna Shas, which was printed much later. Recall the first printing was in Venice, 1520-1523. He worked to fix the errors in the printed text, so he knew either from logic or comparing to manuscripts that “Rabbi Akiva” was wrong. He makes the correction to Rabbi Yaakov.
Thirdly, I tell everyone to check out the Friedberg Jewish Manuscript Society’s website, which offers manuscript variants side by side, but people don’t find that site so accessible. Still, recently, Al HaTorah incorporated these girsological variants into their website. Every Talmudic passage has כ”י, meaning kitvei yad, in a light-grey in the top corner. Clicking on that expands to show a columnar comparison of words and phrases in the passage. Looking down the column, we see that the Venice and Vilna printings have Akiva, and all manuscripts have Yaakov.