Seeing Is Believing: Miracles, Providence, and Reality in the Talmuds
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The last chapter of tractate Berakhot (“Benedictions”) is exceptional. It does not discuss the set daily liturgy, as does the rest of the tractate, but rather presents benedictions to be said following encounters with various phenomena, both seen and heard. These benedictions carry none of the permanence of the fixed liturgy, but are reflexive to the world around them. This makes the closing chapter a rare depository of information about the rabbinic world view. In this list of phenomena and their appropriate liturgical responses, the discerning reader can detect the manner in which the rabbis theologically conceptualize the world around them. This article focuses on the benediction that opens the chapter—for miracles—and the discussions about it in the two Talmuds. A close reading of these discussions reveals some of the ways in which rabbis in Roman Palestine and Sassanian Babylonia explained miracles and account for their (non)existence in their own reality.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".