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Talmud

The Jews believe that the Law falls under two divisions — the Written Law (Torah shebeketeb), and the Oral, or that "upon the lip" (Torah shebeal pi), of which the latter, or "tradition," is equally authoritative with the former, or even more so. The Written Law, the Bible, can be characterized as universal: the Oral Law, is represented in the Talmud, which consists of the Mishna and the Gemara.

The Oral Law remained absolutely unwritten at least down to the time of the later Tanaim (about AD 30—80), who, indeed, thought it wrong to commit it to writing. The older collection of Hagaddth ("legends or narrations") and Halachdth ("rules") on times and solemnities is supposed to have been drawn up by Hanania Ben Hiskia around that time. But the first who reduced the Mishna to writing was the famous Rabbi Jehuda Hakkodesh, who died AD 190. His reason for doing so was the apparent danger of national extinction after the fearful massacre which ensued on the defeat of Bar-Cochebas and the capture of Bethyr; but although the reduction of the Oral Law to writing was discouraged, secret rolls (megilldth setharim) of it are said to have existed before. In point of fact, laws are often, by a sort of fiction, supposed to be "unwritten " for centuries after they may be read in print.

Talmud is the remarkable monument to the Jewish genius known as the Talmud and containing the thoughts and legal decisions of the chief Jewish leaders from 150 BC to 500 AD. Jewish written law is contained in the Torah [the Pentateuch, the Five Books of Moses). The Talmud is the compilation of Jewish "oral" law which elaborates on the "written" law. Talmud consists of the mishna, compiled about the year 200 AD, and the gemara, further commentaries and discussions on the mishna compiled about the year 500 AD, and later put into written. Talmud is mainly concerned with halacha (Jewish law) but also provides a detailed record of the beliefs of the Jewish people, their philosophy, traditions, culture, and folklore, i.e., the haggadah (homiletics).

The origin of the Talmud is coeval with the return from the Babylonish captivity. One of the most mysterious and momentous periods in the history of humanity, that brief space of the Exile brought to bear influences upon the captives. From a reckless, lawless, godless populace, they returned transformed into a band of Puritans. Scarcely aware before of the existence of their glorious national literature, the people now began to press round these brands plucked from the fire — the scanty records of their faith and history — with a fierce and passionate love, a love stronger even than that of wife and child. These same documents, as they were gradually formed into a canon, became the immutable centre of their lives, their actions, their thoughts, their very dreams. From that time forth, with scarcely any intermission, the keenest as well as the most poetical minds of the nation remained fixed upon them. "Turn it and turn it again," says the Talmud, with regard to the Bible, "for everything is in it." "Search the Scriptures," is the distinct utterance of the New Testament.

There being no mention either of a future life, or of prayer as a duty, it would be easy for the Pharisees at a time when prayer was universally practiced, and a future life was generally believed in or desired, to argue from the supposed inconceivability of a true revelation not commanding prayer, or not asserting a future life, to the necessity of Moses having treated of both orally. And when the principle of an oral tradition in two such important points was once admitted, it was easy for a skillful controversialist to carry the application of the principle much farther by insisting that there was precisely the same evidence for numerous other traditions having come from Moses as for those two; and that it was illogical, as well as presumptuous, to admit the two only, and to exercise the right of selection and private judgment respecting the rest.

Mishnah

The Mishnah, from shanah {tana), to learn, to repeat, has been of old translated "second law". But this derivation, correct as it seems literally, is incorrect in the first instance. It simply means "Learning" a complement to the Mosaic code, but in such a manner that in developing and enlarging, it supersedes it. The Pentateuch remains in all cases the background and latent source of the Mishnah. Eventually an expanding body of Mishnah commentary itself became an object of study, and this stratum of rabbinic learning finds written expression in the book called the Talmud.

Mishnah is how the rabbis routinely referred to the content of their learning. The Hebrew root of the word contains the idea of repetition, so one rendering of Mishnah may be "repeated tradition." The main body of the Mishnah consists of teachings attributed to authorites from about the middle of the first century AD, through to the second decade of the third century AD. The bulk of ordinances, injunctions, prohibitions, precepts, the old and new, traditional, derived, or enacted on the spur of the moment, had, after hundreds of years, risen to gigantic proportions, proportions no longer to be mastered in their scattered, and be it remembered, chiefly unwritten, form. Thrice, at different periods, the work of reducing them to system and order was undertaken by three eminent masters; the third alone succeeded.

1. First by Hillel I, under whose presidency Christ was born. This Hillel, also called the second Ezra, was born in Babylon. Thirst for knowledge drove him to Jerusalem. About 30 BC there were no less than some six hundred vaguely floating sections of it in existence by that time. He tried to reduce them to six. But he died, and the work commenced by him was left untouched for another century.
2. Akiba, the poor shepherd who fell in love with the daughter of the richest and proudest man in all Jerusalem, and through his love, from a clown became one of the most eminent doctors of his generation, nay, "a second Moses," came next. But he too was unsuccessful. His legal labors were cut short by the Roman executioner. Yet the day of his martyrdom is said to have been the day of the birth of him who, at last, did carry out the work.
3. Jehuda, the Saint, also called "Rabbi" by way of eminence. About 200 AD, the redaction of the whole unwritten law into a code, though still unwritten, was completed after the immense efforts, not of one school, but of all, not through one, but many methods of collection, comparison, and condensation. The legal digest compiled by Rabbi Judah the Prince around the year 200 AD is called "the Mishnah". R. Judah took various traditions of individual sages and redacted them into a single document six Divisions of 62 thematically related tractates. This redaction did not involve writing down the traditions, but merely the determining and organizing of a fixed text that was subsequently disseminated by memory.

The Mishnah is divided into six sections. These are subdivided again into n, 12, 7, 9 (or 10), n, and 12 chapters respectively, which are further broken up into 524 paragraphs.

1. Section I., Seeds: of Agrarian Laws, commencing with a chapter on Prayers. In this section the various tithes and donations due to the Priests, the Levites, and the poor, from the products of the lands, and further the Sabbatical year, and the prohibited mixtures in plants, animals, and garments, are treated of.
2. Section II., Feasts: of Sabbaths, Feast and Fast days, the work prohibited, the ceremonies ordained, the sacrifices to be offered, on them. Special chapters are devoted to the Feast of the Exodus from Egypt, to the New Year's Day, to the Day of Atonement (one of the most impressive portions of the whole book), to the Feast of Tabernacles, and to that of Haman.
3. Section III., Women: of betrothal, marriage, divorce, etc.; also of vows.
4. Section IV, Damages: including a great part of the civil and criminal law. It treats of the law of trover, of buying and selling, and the ordinary monetary transactions. Further, of the greatest crime known to the law, viz., idolatry. Next of witnesses, of oaths, of legal punishments, and of the Sanhedrin itself. This section concludes with the socalled 'Sentences of the Fathers,' containing some of the sublimest ethical dicta known in the history of religious philosophy.
5. Section V., Sacred Things: of sacrifices, the first-born, etc.; also of the measurements of the Temple (Middoth).
6. Section VI., Purifications: of the various levitical and other hygienic laws, of impure things and persons, their purification, etc.

The regulations contained in these six treatises are of very different kinds. They are apparently important and unimportant, intended to be permanent or temporary. They are either clear expansions of Scriptural precepts, or independent traditions, linked to Scripture only hermeneutically. They are "decisions," "fences," "injunctions," "ordinances," or simply "Mosaic Halachah from Sinai"—much as the Roman laws consist of "Senatusconsulta," "Plebiscita," "Edicta," "Responsa Prudentium," and the rest.

That the Mishnah was appealed to for all practical purposes, in preference to the "Mosaic" law, seems clear and natural. Who would generally appeal in our law-courts to the Magna Charta? The tone and tenor of the Mishnah is, except in the one special division devoted to Ethics, emphatically practical. It does not concern itself with Metaphysics, but aims at being merely a civil code. Yet it never misses an opportunity of inculcating those higher ethical principles which lie beyond the strict letter of the law. The Mishnah knows nothing of "Hell." For all and any transgressions there were only the fixed legal punishments, or a mysterious sudden "visitation of God"—the scriptural "rooting out." Death atones for all sins. Minor transgressions are redeemed by repentance, charity, sacrifice, and the day of atonement. Sins committed against man are only forgiven when the injured man has had full amends made and declares himself reconciled. The highest virtue lies in the study of the law.

Gemara

Gemara is a term used to designate the post-Mishnaic stratum of rabbinic tradition. The Mishna is very concisely written, and requires notes. This circumstance led to the Commentaries called Gemara (i. e. Supplement, Completion), which form the second part of the Talmud, and which are very commonly meant when the word "Talmud" is used by itself. The language of the Mishna is that of the later Hebrew, purely written on the whole, though with a few grammatical Aramaisms, and interspersed with Greek, Latin, and Aramaic words which had become naturalized. The Talmud and Gemara, are synonymous terms deriving from words meaning "study" or "learning." Originally indicating "study," they both became terms for special studies, and indicated special works. "Talmud" is Hebrew, whereas "Gemara" (in the present sense) is found only in the Aramaic dialect of the Babylonian Talmud. The Talmud is composed in a mixture of Hebrew and Aramaic (the latter was the spoken vernacular of Babylonian Jews).

Mishnah simply means "Learning," like Gemara, which, besides, indicates "complement" to the Mishnah. The Mishnah, on its own part again, forms a kind of text to which the Gemara is not so much a scholion as a critical expansion. But it is the business of the Gemara to examine into the legitimacy and correctness of this Mishnic development in single instances. The Pentateuch remained under all circumstances the immutable, divinely given constitution, the written law: in contradistinction to it, the Mishnah, together with the Gemara, was called the oral, or "unwritten" law.

The Mishnah, being formed into a code, became in its turn what the Scripture had been, a basis of development and discussion. It had to be linked to the Bible, it became impregnated with and obscured by speculations, new traditions sprang up, new methods were invented, casuistry assumed its sway — as it did in the legal schools that flourished at that period at Rome, at Alexandria, at Berytus, — and the Gemara ensued. A double Gemara: one, the expression of the schools in Palestine, called that of Jerusalem, redacted at Tiberias (not at Jerusalem) about 390 AD, and written in what may be called "East Aramaean;" the other, redacted at Syra in Babylonia, edited by R. Ashe (365-427 AD). The final close of this codex, however, the collecting and sifting of which took just sixty years, is due to the school of the "Saboraim" at the end of the fifth century AD.

Neither of the two codes was written down at first and neither has survived in its completeness. Whether there ever was a double Gemara to all the six or even the first five divisions of the Mishnah (the sixth having early fallen into disuse), is at least very doubtful. Much, however, that existed has been lost. The Babylonian Talmud is about four times as large as that of Jerusalem. Its thirty-six treatises now cover, in our editions, printed with the most prominent commentaries (Rashi and Tosafoth), exactly 2947 folio leaves in twelve folio volumes, the pagination of which is kept uniform in almost all editions. If, however, the extraneous portions are subtracted, it is only about ten or eleven times as large as the Mishnah, which was redacted just as many generations before the Talmud.

The date 500 AD is the traditional date of the completion of the Babylonian Talmud, with the conclusion of the Amoraic era. This date is problematic, since the process of redaction appears to have continued for several centuries thereafter.