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TALMUD

The masterwork of rabbinic Judaism, the book that distinguishes Judaism from other faith traditions that lay claim to Hebrew Scripture and/or its tradition of prophetic revelation. The Talmud (lit., “the study”) is based upon and includes the Mishnah in its entirety, but grafts to it the Gemara (lit., “the completion”), a far lengthier work woven from the discussions in the academies of Babylonia and the Galilee in the 3rd through 6th centuries c.e. Since the great bulk of the Talmud is the Gemara, the two names are often used interchangeably, except when a distinction must be made between the two parts of the talmudic text.

The Talmud follows the topical structure of the Mishnah, but differs in many other ways. It departs from the Hebrew of the Mishnah, being written in the Aramaic vernacular of most of the Middle East of that time. Where the Mishnah is concise and focused, the Gemara is expansive; where the Mishnah summarizes and codifies the law, the Gemara analyzes and debates, exposing the process of thought behind the surface, and actively engaging its readership in that process.

The authors of the Talmud and its readership understood the work as the authoritative transmission of the Torah’s oral tradition. As such, it continually refers beyond its written page to the concrete realities of Jewish life, of which the Written Law is foremost. It extends itself in this way through two basic modes, halakhah and haggadah. Halakhah (lit., “walking” or “going”) is law, the determination of divine instruction in precise and concrete terms; haggadah (lit., “telling”) is the recasting of those concrete terms in light of their deeper significance. The halakhic material strives to define the divine in practical norms of behavior; the haggadic, to uncover the divinity hidden in the everyday realities and reveal the living core which animates the life defined by the law.

There are actually two Talmuds, the Bavli or Babylonian Talmud, produced in the academies of Sassonid Iraq and redacted primarily by R. Ashi and Ravina, and the Yerushalmi or Palestinian Talmud, coming from the schools in the north of the land of Israel. The Palestinian Talmud is a shorter, more difficult, and less-studied work. Political instability and religious persecution closed the academies there a full hundred years before the redaction of the Babylonian Talmud was completed, both hurrying the work of redaction and denying the environment in which an interpretive tradition could arise. By contrast, the yeshiva of Sura, the greatest of the Babylonian academies, remained a center of teaching for nearly five centuries after the Bavli’s completion, ensuring a continuous interpretive tradition for the text in part produced within its doors. Accordingly, the Babylonian Talmud has been the center of religious study, and it is of greater legal authority, whereas it is usually only the accomplished scholar who ventures into the Palestinian Talmud.

The Talmud was first set in print during the late 15th century. Despite being variously banned, burned, and altered by censorship in Christian Europe, it has continuously served as the center of traditional Jewish study. In the nearly 1500 years since its redaction, it has inspired countless exegetical, homiletical, legal, and even poetic and mystical works. Its study today remains fundamental to Jewish scholarship.

Bibliography. A. Guttmann, Rabbinic Judaism in the Making (Detroit, 1970); A. Steinsalts, The Essential Talmud (1976, repr. Northvale, N.J., 1992).

Shmuel Klatzkin

Prayer Tents Bible References - Prayer Tents

TALMUD

Eerdmans Dictionary of the Bible (2000)