Jastrow's Talmudic Dictionary

Talmudic Lattice Path Counting

Consider all planar walks, with positive unit steps (1, 0) and (0, 1), from the origin (0, 0) to a given point (a, b). Let L be the line joining the beginning to the end, i.e., the line b x a y = 0. Call the region below L "downtown," and the region above L "uptown," the line L being the border-line between downtown and uptown. Each such walk has a + b 1 points, not counting the endpoints. For ...

Biblical and Talmudic medicine

first with the poetic view of mind, with examples from Homer and the tragedians, second with the philosopher's, i.e. largely Plato's, and finally with the medical, i.e. the early Hippocratic texts. All three approaches are combined in a discussion of hysteria, in which he also stresses the social and sexual prohibitions of Athenian women and the ambivalent, yet often effective, distancing of th...

The mental status exam in talmudic medicine.

An early reference to the clinical evaluation of “delirium” appears in the seventh chapter of the Talmudic tractate dealing with divorce documents and proceedings.1 The Rabbis in Mishnaic (ie, Tannaim) and Talmudic (ie, Amoraim) times, extending from the beginning of the Common Era to ~800 CE, needed absolute assurance regarding a husband’s willful intention to divorce his wife for a variety of...

Uncertainty Rules in Talmudic Reasoning 1

A Talmudic Bankruptcy Solution: the Ccc Principle

Following a bankruptcy, how should we distribute the available assets among the eligible creditors? Most people would accept a proportional distribution—for each claimant, calculate her percentage of the sum of all claims and assign her that same percentage of total assets. However, this is not the only reasonable approach. For example, if every claim is at least as large as total assets, assig...