Nothing New Under the Sun: The First Language Models
אֵין כָּל חָדָשׁ תַּחַת הַשָּׁמֶשׁ There is nothing new under the sun. (Kohelet 1:9)
I call this series Nothing New Under the Sun. People get angry at me for it, as if I think I am getting close to Shlomo HaMelech. I am not saying that. I just think it is a great title, and it happens to be his line. I am also not a Rabbi. If anything here touches on practice, ask one.
Here is the idea. Everyone talks about large language models as if they came out of nowhere. I think the structure behind them has been inside Judaism all along.
Shlomo HaMelech, the first model
The book of Kings says Shlomo spoke 3,000 proverbs and his songs numbered 1,005 (I Kings 5:12). The Talmud goes further. It says that for every single thing he said, he had 3,000 parables, and for each parable, 1,005 reasons (Eruvin 21b).
That is a network. Every proverb connects to thousands of others, and every connection carries context. And one mind sits behind all of it. In today's language, Shlomo was the brain behind the whole model.
The rules for making connections
A model needs rules for how one piece of text links to another. Judaism wrote those rules down.
Hillel taught 7 rules for reading the Torah. Rabbi Yishmael expanded them to 13. That list, the Baraita of Rabbi Yishmael, opens the Sifra, and it is printed in almost every siddur in the morning prayers, in Hebrew, though it could be translated into any language. Later, Rabbi Eliezer ben Rabbi Yose HaGelili taught 32 rules.
Seven, then 13, then 32. Each set is a method for connecting verses and words: comparing similar words, reasoning from a light case to a heavy one, reading a general rule against its details. If you want a modern word for it, those are the training rules.
Weights: whose opinion counts more
Once you have opinions, you need to know which one wins. The Torah gives the basic rule: follow the majority (Shemot 23:2).
Then there are weights. When Rabbi Yossi disagrees with one colleague, the law follows Rabbi Yossi, because, as the Talmud puts it, his reasoning is with him (Eruvin 46b). When Beit Hillel and Beit Shammai disagreed, the law went with Beit Hillel (Eruvin 13b).
But one voice does not beat the majority. The famous case is the Oven of Akhnai (Bava Metzia 59b). Rabbi Eliezer stood alone against the other sages. A carob tree moved, a stream ran backward, and a voice from heaven said he was right. The sages still ruled against him: "It is not in heaven." Once the Torah and its rules were given, the answer had to come from the system, not from a sign.
Rambam compresses the Talmud
By the 1100s, the Talmud was too big for most people. Rambam (Maimonides) said, more or less, nobody has time for all of this, and wrote the Mishneh Torah, a complete code of Jewish law. He finished it around 1180, and on purpose he left out the sources.
That made people nervous. If you cannot see where an answer came from, how do you trust it? The fight over his writings got so bitter that around 1232 in Montpellier, his Guide for the Perplexed and the first book of the Mishneh Torah were burned. Rabbeinu Yonah, one of his opponents, later publicly regretted his part and spoke of Rambam with honor.
An answer without sources makes people uneasy. Sound familiar? It is the same complaint people make about AI today.
Rabbi Yosef Karo's three-model vote
In the 1500s in Tzfat, Rabbi Yosef Karo did it differently. First he wrote the Beit Yosef, a huge work that shows every source. Then he wrote the short version, the Shulchan Aruch, printed in 1565.
His method: take three great authorities, the Rif, the Rambam and the Rosh, and where they disagree, follow the majority of the three. That is what engineers now call an ensemble. Then Rabbi Moshe Isserles, the Rema, in Krakow, added notes for Ashkenazi practice. A base model, plus a regional fine-tune.
Where the comparison stops
A language model predicts the most likely next word. Nobody stands behind its answer. Halacha has a chain of transmission going back to Sinai, fixed rules, and named people who answer for their rulings. The structure is the same. The accountability is not.
That is the point. The shape of the thing we are now so amazed by, connected texts, rules for linking them, weighted authorities, compression into a usable answer, was here all along.
Nothing new under the sun.