I need help uncompressing a tar file.  8-D

I have a 67 GB tar file. I believe it contains about 700,000 files equally distributed between two subdirectories. When I try to uncompress the tar file, I eventually get a repeated "file too large" error looking like this:

 tar: document_parses/pdf_json/40afe13d64d6a5ef6640537e9f2334c0d86dfa88.json: Cannot open: File too large

tar uncompresses many of the files, but not all of them. It seems to get stuck on the file names that are rather long. In the subdirectories, where the files are being stored, the number of files is above 28,000. The files are being saved on an AFS file system. 

I can't believe the file names are too long since all of the files have same length of file name. Nor, is my file system (quota) full.

What is going on here? What file is too large? 

--
Eric Morgan
University of Notre Dame