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I heard that Bava Basra is the longest masechta in blatt but Brochos is the longest mesechta in words. Did anyone else hear anything about that?

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3 Answers3

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What most likely got this rumor started is that Brachos does have and lots of pages with minimal commentary. Brachos does in fact (according to my calculations) take the record for most Talmudic text per page.

words/daf letters/daf words letters daf mesechta
1,115.14 4,337.46 70,254 273,260 63 ברכות
975.11 3,786.44 26,328 102,234 27 כריתות
971.69 3,771.92 12,632 49,035 13 הוריות
933.52 3,718.42 28,939 115,271 31 מגילה
931.76 3,625.12 104,357 406,013 112 סנהדרין
889.70 3,536.23 26,691 106,087 30 תענית
805.50 3,204.36 22,554 89,722 28 מועד קטן
815.60 3,179.48 39,149 152,615 48 סוטה
751.97 2,972.61 24,815 98,096 33 ערכין
765.57 2,947.04 17,608 67,782 23 מכות
729.62 2,866.87 113,820 447,232 156 שבת
731.56 2,859.64 59,256 231,631 81 קידושין
712.81 2,827.15 18,533 73,506 26 חגיגה
715.04 2,800.14 84,375 330,417 118 בבא מציעא
711.64 2,782.31 83,973 328,313 118 בבא קמא
691.35 2,762.51 51,851 207,188 75 עבודה זרה
698.94 2,760.97 23,065 91,112 33 תמורה
696.08 2,738.49 50,118 197,171 72 נידה
698.23 2,729.91 84,486 330,319 121 יבמות
687.53 2,724.15 23,376 92,621 34 ראש השנה
686.13 2,704.34 82,335 324,521 120 פסחים
683.51 2,684.79 60,832 238,946 89 גיטין
676.45 2,668.62 40,587 160,117 60 בכורות
681.60 2,660.13 32,717 127,686 48 שבועות
671.59 2,648.57 73,203 288,694 109 מנחות
661.24 2,602.73 73,398 288,903 111 כתובות
657.24 2,592.09 57,180 225,512 87 יומא
646.52 2,540.40 67,238 264,202 104 עירובין
638.92 2,507.10 24,918 97,777 39 ביצה
635.14 2,494.26 89,555 351,691 141 חולין
587.31 2,323.16 32,302 127,774 55 סוכה
582.73 2,299.84 69,345 273,681 119 זבחים
512.22 2,049.89 4,610 18,449 9 תמיד
508.82 1,978.57 89,044 346,249 175 בבא בתרא
430.52 1,670.32 27,984 108,571 65 נזיר
384.00 1,535.95 8,064 32,255 21 מעילה
383.06 1,499.28 34,475 134,935 90 נדרים
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Shalom
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  • Where did you find that? – SimchasTorah Aug 26 '10 at 23:14
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    Downloaded the texts from mechon mamre, and wrote a computer program to count everything. – Shalom Aug 27 '10 at 01:20
  • @Shalom Can you add Shekalim (as printed in the Bavli) to the list? – Double AA Oct 20 '13 at 16:37
  • If you still have the code, could you post it somewhere (like a gist) for other people to see? – Scimonster Oct 18 '17 at 17:24
  • Can someone explain what the columns "letters/daf" and "words/daf" signify in the chart linked by @user1887 , please? – Oliver Oct 18 '17 at 21:51
  • @Oliver a daf is a (2-sided) page of Gemara, as defined by the pages that have become standard the past century plus. Each page has some text of the Talmud, surrounded by commentary. If the material is fairly simple, expect many letters/words of Talmudic text per page (not a lot of space needed for commentary). If the material is complex (or the commentaries verbose), each page will have fewer letters of Talmudic text, and much more commentary instead. I compared letters vs. words to see if there was much difference (do certain tractates use longer words on average?). – Shalom Oct 19 '17 at 00:47
  • @Oliver that's precisely the point of this question: people know that number of daf is a poor measure of Gemara text length, because text-per-def varies tremendously. Open a Gemara Brachos and you'll see tons of text, very little commentary -- leading some to the mistaken belief that it has the longest text. What they are accurately noticing is it has the highest words-per-daf rate. (A better quick measure of text length is simply: how many chapters are there?) – Shalom Oct 19 '17 at 05:02
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    Cited in Footnote 4 in this Seforim Blog post – Isaac Moses Feb 16 '20 at 06:14
  • @Shalom just wondering, how did you convert the Mechon Mamre htm files to txt files? I am attempting a similar project to what you are doing, and I need a txt copy of the Talmud... – fartgeek Dec 25 '22 at 01:58
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    @fartgeek https://stackoverflow.com/questions/14694482/converting-html-to-text-with-python . I think I'd actually done it with just raw string manipulation ... but welcome to the 2020s -- use BeautifulSoup. Just remember that those files are in cp1255 and not the default utf-8. text=open('myfile.html', encoding='cp1255') – Shalom Dec 25 '22 at 15:32
  • @Shalom thank you – fartgeek Dec 25 '22 at 16:29
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No, Shabbos is the longest.

See the comments here: Shelosha Veshishim - mi yodeya?

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Dave
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    So at least I'm not the only one who heard the debunked Brachos rumor ... I wonder where it came from. – Shalom Aug 26 '10 at 21:52
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    @Shalom They say it in the name of the Vilna Gaon, but I have no idea why. – Yehoshua Mar 12 '16 at 17:16
  • @Shalom 1/2 While I’ve heard the rumor too for many years, with different names of masechtot and in the name of various people I’ve never seen a legitimate source from the VG. But supposing the rumor is true I wonder if a) the individual(s) who asserted so was simply wrong or b) the the computation of words yielded different totals; IOW, Rabbi X counted קמ״ל as three words (=קא משמע לן) whereas the computer counts it as one. Same goes for dozens of other acronyms. – Oliver Jan 27 '21 at 13:36
  • @Yehoshua 2/2 Furthermore, supposing the VG did assert so, I wonder (but doubt) if his emendations and the textual variants between the edition(s) he used (Amsterdam 1644 & Frankfurt on the Oder 1715) and the Mamre text (IIRC they use the Vilna ed.) could make up for the discrepancy. – Oliver Jan 27 '21 at 14:05
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I would like to share a useful file I created based on Shalom's wonderfully detailed answer to the question. Many thanks to him! I created a card that lists the masechtot in order of Seder and then in order of length. So it gives some sense of the order of Shas but puts the largest Masechta first, etc.

This card portrays the relative length in units of 0.5% of the words of Shas, approximately, and can be used to mark off progress in learning, chazara and mastering the knowledge, with the level being self-reported. Comments and suggestions welcome. enter image description here Here is a PDF Length of Masechtot in Words - Track Learning and Chazaros

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