The short version: the Talmud is not one book but a library built in layers over about five centuries. At its core is the Mishnah, a law code in Hebrew compiled in Galilee around 200 CE. Around the Mishnah grew the Gemara, “completion”, the record of how later generations of rabbis discussed, questioned and extended it. Mishnah and Gemara together make a Talmud, and there are two: one finished in Galilee around 400 CE, and a much larger one finished in Babylonia between about 500 and 700 CE. When people say “the Talmud” they almost always mean the Babylonian one.[1][2] Majority
The Mishnah: law for a Temple that was gone
After the Romans destroyed the Temple in 70 CE, a class of scholars, the rabbis, rebuilt Judaism around study, prayer and law (§7). Their central idea was that God gave Moses two Torahs at Sinai: the written one and an oral one that explains it, handed down by word of mouth. The Mishnah’s tractate Avot opens with that chain: “Moses received the Torah from Sinai and transmitted it to Joshua”, then to the elders, the prophets, the men of the Great Assembly, and so to the rabbis.[3] Consensus on the text.
Around 200 CE the circle of Rabbi Judah the Patriarch gathered this teaching into the Mishnah: six orders and sixty-three tractates on agriculture, festivals, marriage, civil and criminal law, sacrifices and purity. A striking amount of it describes Temple rites in exact detail, more than a century after the Temple fell.[1][4] Whether Rabbi Judah wrote it down or had it memorised is itself debated; the Talmuds speak of professional reciters who learned it by heart.[5][1] Contested
The Gemara: five centuries of argument
The Mishnah became the textbook of the rabbinic schools in Galilee and in Babylonia, the old community of the exile, which lived outside the Roman Empire under Persian rule. The sages of these schools, the amoraim, debated each paragraph: where its rule comes from in Scripture, how it fits with other rulings, what happens in cases it does not cover. Their discussions were remembered and arranged tractate by tractate. Consensus
The Gemara is not only law. Mixed with the legal argument, called halakhah, is aggadah: stories, sermons, medicine, folklore and theology. Two of the best-known stories show how the rabbis thought about their own authority. In one, Moses visits the classroom of Rabbi Akiva, cannot follow the teaching attributed to him, and is comforted only when Akiva says it is “a law given to Moses at Sinai”.[6] In another, a heavenly voice sides with Rabbi Eliezer in a legal dispute, and Rabbi Joshua answers with Deuteronomy 30:12, “It is not in heaven”: the law is decided by the majority of sages, not by voices from heaven.[7] Consensus on the texts.
Two Talmuds
The Jerusalem Talmud (Yerushalmi), compiled mainly in Tiberias, was completed around 400 CE, perhaps hurried by hard times for the Jews of a now Christian Roman Palestine. It covers 39 tractates of the Mishnah, is strongest on the agricultural laws of the Land of Israel, and is terse and often unfinished.[1] Majority
The Babylonian Talmud (Bavli) covers 37 tractates but is far longer and more developed. Its named rabbis lived from the third to the fifth century. What gives it its character is the anonymous voice, the stam, that frames their statements in a back-and-forth of question, objection and answer. David Weiss Halivni, Shamma Friedman and Jeffrey Rubenstein argue that this layer was composed by editors who lived after the last named authorities, between about 500 and 700 CE.[2] Majority A printed Babylonian Talmud runs to about 2,700 double-sided folios, the amount that the Daf Yomi cycle of a page a day covers in seven and a half years (§13).[8]
How it became the law
The Babylonian Talmud did not win by default. When the Arab conquests arrived in the seventh century, it was studied in two Babylonian academies, Sura and Pumbedita, and little known elsewhere. The heads of those academies, the geonim, answered legal questions sent from across the Islamic world, and by the early eleventh century the Babylonian Talmud was the recognised law of Jews from Spain to Yemen (§8).[9] The Karaites, who rejected the Oral Torah and read the Bible alone, were the main dissenters. Consensus
In medieval Europe, Rashi of Troyes (1040–1105) wrote a running commentary that made the Talmud readable without a teacher, and his grandsons and their students, the Tosafists, built the dialectical method that yeshivas still use.[10][11] The Talmud was also attacked: after a disputation in Paris, about twenty-four cartloads of Talmud manuscripts were burned in 1242, and the Talmud was burned again in Rome in 1553 (§9).[12] That is one reason so few medieval manuscripts survive. The only nearly complete one is the Munich codex of 1342.[13] Consensus
A short timeline
| Date | What happens | Confidence |
|---|---|---|
| 70 CE | The Second Temple is destroyed; the rabbis’ rebuilding begins | Consensus |
| c. 200 CE | The Mishnah is compiled under Rabbi Judah the Patriarch[1] | Majority |
| c. 400 CE | The Jerusalem Talmud is completed in Galilee | Majority |
| c. 500–700 CE | The Babylonian Talmud reaches its final form[2] | Majority |
| c. 589–1038 | The geonim make the Babylonian Talmud the law of Jews everywhere[9] | Consensus |
| 1040–1105 | Rashi’s commentary[10] | Consensus |
| 1242 | The Talmud burned in Paris[12] | Consensus |
| 1342 | The Munich manuscript, the only nearly complete medieval copy[13] | Consensus |
| 1520–23 | Bomberg’s Venice edition fixes the page numbering[11] | Consensus |
| 1 Jan 2020 | Over 90,000 people at MetLife Stadium mark the end of a Daf Yomi cycle[8] | Consensus |
What scholars and the tradition disagree about
Where the Oral Torah comes from. In traditional Judaism the Talmud is the written record of the Oral Torah that God gave Moses at Sinai, transmitted faithfully and unfolded by the sages; the Menahot story itself affirms that what Akiva taught was “a law given to Moses at Sinai”.[6] Historians read the chain of transmission in Avot as a claim of authority, and see much of the law as developed by the rabbis in their own time.[3][1] The two views measure different things: one the source of the law’s authority, the other the date of its wording. Contested
Who made the Babylonian Talmud. The older view, based on the Talmud’s own statement that “Rav Ashi and Ravina are the end of instruction” and on the chronology of Sherira Gaon, credited its completion to those two sages around 500 CE.[14][5] The view now dominant gives the decisive role to the anonymous editors after them.[2] Majority
Common misconceptions
- “The Talmud is the Jewish Bible.” The Jewish Bible is the Tanakh. The Talmud is its rabbinic interpretation and the foundation of Jewish law.
- “Jews follow the Talmud line by line.” Practice is decided through later codes and responsa, such as Maimonides’ Mishneh Torah and the Shulchan Arukh, which draw on the Talmud’s debates and choose between its views (§8, §9).
- “Lists of shocking Talmud quotations show what Jews believe.” Hostile compilations of Talmud passages go back at least to the charges Nicholas Donin brought at the Paris trial of 1240. Some quote real passages, but cut from the debate around them or presenting a rejected opinion as the ruling; many are mistranslated or invented. Either way they misrepresent a text whose method is to record disagreement, and Jewish practice is set by later codes, not by isolated lines.[12] Majority
- “There is one Talmud.” There are two, and they differ in place, date, language and authority.
Why it matters
The Talmud is the reason Judaism today is a religion of study and law rather than of Temple and sacrifice. It turned a biblical religion centred on one building into one that could be carried anywhere and practised by any community with books and teachers. For how the rabbis built it see Chapter 7: Without a Temple: The Rabbis; for how it became the law of the Jewish world see Chapter 8: Under Islam; for its medieval commentators and its burnings see Chapter 9: Ashkenaz, Sepharad and the Kabbalah.
References
- ^ a b c d e f H. L. Strack and Günter Stemberger Introduction to the Talmud and Midrash. Fortress Press, 2nd ed., 1996. The standard reference on the dates, manuscripts and editions of rabbinic texts.
- ^ a b c d Jeffrey L. Rubenstein The Culture of the Babylonian Talmud. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003. The anonymous editors of the Bavli and the academy culture they created.
- ^ a b m. Avot 1:1 — Mishnah. c. 200 CE. Hebrew. Moses received the Torah at Sinai and handed it to Joshua, the elders, the prophets and the men of the Great Assembly. read the text
- ^ Jacob Neusner Judaism: The Evidence of the Mishnah. University of Chicago Press, 1981. The Mishnah as a utopian system built after the loss of the Temple.
- ^ a b Letter of Sherira Gaon (987 CE) — Iggeret Rav Sherira Gaon. 987 CE. Aramaic and Hebrew. The head of the Pumbedita academy answers the Jews of Kairouan on how the Mishnah and Talmud were composed; its two recensions disagree on whether the Mishnah was written down. about
- ^ a b b. Menahot 29b — Babylonian Talmud. c. 500–700 CE. Aramaic and Hebrew. Moses sits in Rabbi Akiva's class and cannot follow it, until Akiva attributes a ruling to 'a law given to Moses at Sinai'. read the text
- ^ b. Bava Metzia 59b — Babylonian Talmud. c. 500–700 CE. Aramaic and Hebrew. The oven of Akhnai: the sages overrule miracles and a heavenly voice because the Torah 'is not in heaven'; law follows the majority. read the text
- ^ a b JTA, 'Over 90,000 people celebrate Siyum Hashas together in New Jersey' (2 January 2020) — Jewish Telegraphic Agency news report. 2020. English. More than 90,000 people, predominantly Orthodox, filled MetLife Stadium on 1 January 2020 to mark the completion of the 13th seven-and-a-half-year Daf Yomi cycle of the Babylonian Talmud. about
- ^ a b Robert Brody The Geonim of Babylonia and the Shaping of Medieval Jewish Culture. Yale University Press, 1998. The standard account of the geonim: academies, responsa, codes and their rivals.
- ^ a b Rashi on Genesis 1:1 — Rashi, Commentary on the Torah. late 11th c. CE. Hebrew. Rashi's first comment: why the Torah opens with creation rather than the first commandment, so that Israel can answer the charge of having seized Canaan. read the text
- ^ a b Marvin J. Heller The Sixteenth Century Hebrew Book. Brill, 2004. Reference work on early Hebrew printing, including Bomberg's Venice editions.
- ^ a b c Robert Chazan The Jews of Medieval Western Christendom, 1000–1500. Cambridge University Press, 2006. The best single survey of Jews in Latin Europe.
- ^ a b Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Cod. hebr. 95 — Babylonian Talmud manuscript. 1342 CE. Aramaic and Hebrew. The only nearly complete manuscript of the Babylonian Talmud, copied in 1342. about
- ^ b. Bava Metzia 86a — Babylonian Talmud. redacted c. 5th–7th c. CE. Hebrew and Aramaic. 'Rabbi and Rabbi Natan are the end of the Mishnah; Rav Ashi and Ravina are the end of instruction': the Talmud's own closing date for the amoraic period. read the text