A specific & a general question on the Talmud

Factual Questions
1

I went to a lecture the other night and a point that came up is that somewhere in the Talmud (I think in Chullin), it said that Adam was actually not the first generation man, but was something like the 972nd (?) generation - I can’t remember the number, but it meant that, adding the generations between Adam and Moshe, Moshe came out as the 1000th generation.

Can anyone give me a page number with this statement, and, even better, a summary or translation of the context of it.

As for the general question, and one that hopefully will mean I don’t need to keep asking this sort of thing here, does anyone know of a good online rendering of the Talmud, or even part of it, in English?

Thanks a lot.

2

There are references to those “lost” generations in a couple of places in the Talmud. In Shabbat 88b and Zevachim 116b, the focus is on the idea that the Torah existed for 974 generations before Creation; in Chagigah 13b-14a, there is a reference to the 974 generations that G-d planned to create but didn’t.

The idea is, as you say, that Moshe would come out as the thousandth generation. Rashi to Chagigah there explains that G-d originally intended to give the Torah after 1000 generations of humanity (based on the verse “a matter that He commanded to the thousandth generation” - Psalms 105:8), but that, realizing that the world couldn’t survive that long without the Torah to guide it, He left those first 974 generations uncreated. (The Talmud adds that the souls of these people were scattered throughout the subsequent generations.)

I don’t know of any complete online Talmud translation (not that there’s anything wrong with asking your questions here!), but the following might help for starters:

There’s a topical index to about a quarter of the Talmud here.

There are a lot of Daf Yomi resources - mostly audio lectures - at
http://www.dafyomi.org/.

3

Thanks for the excellent reply RedNaxela :).

Just as a matter of interest, how did you come up with it? I’m in awe at how you managed to answer what I consider quite an obscure question so quickly.

4

You’re most welcome!

I’ve got two computer programs that contain the entire text of the Talmud (as well as a number of other classic Jewish texts), both of which have good search engines. One is called MTR; it’s freeware, and is available here. That one doesn’t contain any commentaries, though. The other is a commercial (CDROM-based) program called Tanach Plus; here’s the distributor’s site.* That one contains the commentaries of Rashi and Tosafot on the Talmud. (Neither of them contains any English translations, unfortunately.)

Anyway, I just plugged in the Hebrew words for “nine hundred seventy-four” into these programs’ search engines. (This isn’t a number that comes up very much in other contexts; it would have been a lot harder if it was some round number like one thousand.)

So all in all, it’s not much to be awed about. ;j

  • Mods: if I understand the rules correctly, I can post such a link as long as I’m not affiliated in any way with the company. Is this correct? If not, then please remove the link, and my humble apologies.