Corpus Analysis

Computed views over the mined-teachings corpus: 21,037 classified dicta across 11 sages, extracted by attribution formula from the Mishnah and Talmud Bavli and machine-classified by kind, type, and topic.

The eleven corpora

Sage	Era	Dicta	Halacha	Dialogue	Top topics
Hillel	zugot	41	39%	0%	ritual purity (7), dietary law (3), interest law (3)
Rabban Yochanan ben Zakkai	tannaim	29	24.1%	0%	civil law (4), ritual purity (3), study (3)
Rabbi Akiva	tannaim	1330	47%	0.6%	ritual purity (69), civil law (18), dietary law (18)
Rabbi Elazar ben Azariah	tannaim	163	45.4%	0%	shema audibility (6), circumcision care (5), first tithe (5)
Rabbi Yehudah bar Ilai	tannaim	3765	53%	0.2%	sciatic nerve (13), communal offering (11), goring ox (9)
Rav	amoraim	2686	61%	0.8%	gentile cooking (10), deathbed gift (9), proper intention (9)
Shmuel	amoraim	2132	70%	2.5%	deathbed gift (11), animal restraint (8), menstrual checks (8)
Rabbi Yochanan	amoraim	4470	46.1%	1.6%	legal precedent (21), torah study (20), paschal offering (13)
Abaye	amoraim	2098	88.3%	27.4%	ritual impurity (19), shabbat carrying (15), shabbat domains (13)
Rava	amoraim	3351	87.6%	9.1%	shabbat carrying (27), torah study (26), ritual impurity (25)
Rav Ashi	amoraim	972	90.3%	9%	ritual impurity (7), shabbat carrying (7), forbidden relations (6)

Era drift: what the eras talk about

Each topic's share of its era's corpus (tannaitic era = zugot + tannaim, 5,328 dicta; amoraim, 15,709 dicta), for the corpus-wide leading topics. The clearest signal: ritual purity dominates tannaitic speech and nearly vanishes from amoraic speech, while meta-legal topics (legal precedent) appear only among the amoraim.

Dispute pairs

Sage pairs most often named together in dispute-classified segments (counted once per segment). Co-occurrence in a dispute, not outcomes.

#	Pair	Segments
1	Rav ↔ Shmuel	268
2	Rabbi Yochanan ↔ Reish Lakish	197
3	Abaye ↔ Rava	180
4	Rabbi Meir ↔ Rabbi Yehudah bar Ilai	143
5	Rav ↔ Rabbi Yochanan	69
6	Rabbi Akiva ↔ Rabbi Yishmael	54
7	Shmuel ↔ Rabbi Yochanan	47
8	Rabbi Eliezer ben Hyrcanus ↔ Rabbi Akiva	45
9	Rabbi Yochanan ↔ Rabbi Elazar ben Pedat	36
10	Rabbah ↔ Rava	24
11	Rabbi Yehoshua ben Chananiah ↔ Rabbi Akiva	18
12	Rabbi Yehudah bar Ilai ↔ Rabbi Yochanan	16
13	Rabbi Yochanan ↔ Rav Huna	16
14	Rabbi Yochanan ↔ Rava	16
15	Rabbi Eliezer ben Hyrcanus ↔ Rabbi Yehudah bar Ilai	15
16	Rabbi Akiva ↔ Rabbi Yehudah bar Ilai	15
17	Rava ↔ Rav Ashi	15
18	Rabbi Akiva ↔ Rabbi Meir	14
19	Rav ↔ Rava	14
20	Rav ↔ Rav Asi	14

Abaye and Rava, head to head

Counted honestly, this is co-occurrence, not psak: 258 segments carry both Abaye and Rava as attributed speakers. Beyond those, Abaye is the attributed speaker in 19 more segments that merely name Rava, and Rava in 17 that merely name Abaye — nearly even. The asymmetry is in total output: 3351 dicta for Rava against 2098 for Abaye. Which position "won" a given dispute is a question these counts do not answer.

Methods — what these numbers are, and are not

The miner counts dicta expressly attributed by formula (אמר X, X אומר, תני X, משום X, …) in the merged printed text of the Mishnah and Talmud Bavli only — no Tosefta, Yerushalmi, or midrashim, and no stories about a sage. Attribution follows the letter of the printed text (רבא and רבה are never merged). Classification (kind/type/topic/summary) is machine-generated and topic tags are free text, normalized here only for case and whitespace; the classifier's "unclear" tag marks passages too fragmentary to classify and is excluded from every topic ranking (those items are surfaced as fragmentary counts on the sage pages instead). Transmission-chain counts exclude every chain whose attribution carries ואיתימא. Dispute partners and dispute pairs count co-occurrence of recognized names in the same segment — sages missing from the alias table (Shammai, Beit Hillel/Beit Shammai as houses, most tannaim) are invisible to those counts, so all pair numbers are lower bounds. None of these numbers state halachic outcomes.