Bava Bathra, fol. 74, col. 2.
This provision for the coming Messianic banquet is considered of sufficient importance to be mentioned year after year in the service for the Day of Atonement and also at the Feast of Tabernacles. The remark of D. Levi, that the feast here referred to is to be understood allegorically, involves rather sweeping consequences, as it is open to any one to annihilate many other expectations on the same principle.
The Holy One—blessed be He!—will add to Jerusalem gardens extending to a thousand times their numerical value, which equals one hundred and sixty-nine, etc.
Ibid., fol. 75, col. 2.
"Moreover Manasseh shed innocent blood very much" (2 Kings xxi. 16). Here (in Babylon) it is interpreted to mean that he murdered Isaiah, but in the West (i.e., in Palestine) they say that he made an image of the weight of a thousand men, which was the number he massacred every day (as Rashi says, by the heaviness of its weight).
Sanhedrin, fol. 103, col. 2.
See Josephus, Antiq., Book X. chap, iii., sec. 1, for corroborative evidence. Tradition says that Manasseh caused Isaiah to be sawn asunder with a wooden saw. (See also Yevamoth, fol. 49, col. 2; Sanhedrin, fol. 103, col. 2.)
Nowhere in the Talmud do we find the name of the great image here referred to. What if we christen it the "Juggernaut of the Talmud"? May the tradition not be a prelusion or a reflex of that man-crushing monster? Anyhow, scholars are aware of a community of no inconsiderable extent between the conceptions and legends of the Hindoos and the Rabbis. One notable contrast, however, between this Juggernaut and that of the Hindoos is, that whereas in both cases the innocent suffered for the guilty, in the former that sacrifices were exacted to propitiate Satan, while in the latter they were freely offered in supposed propitiation of the gods.
The food consumed by Og, king of Bashan, consisted of a thousand oxen and as many of all sorts of other beasts, and his drink consisted of a thousand measures, etc.
Sophrim, chap. 21, mish. 9.