Talmud

Talmud (תִּלמוּד, talmud, doctrine; from לָמִד, "to teach"). :The Talmud-, "that wonderful monument of human industry, human wisdom,. and human folly" (Milman), is the work- which embodies the canonical and civil laws of the Jews. It consists of a Mishna (q.v.). as text, and a voluminous collection of commentaries and illustrations, called in the more modern Hebrew Horaa, and in Aramaic Gemara, "the complement" or "completion," from גּמִר, "to make perfect." Thence the men who delivered these decisive commentaries are called Gemarists, sometimes Horaim, but more commonly Amoraim.

1. History and Composition. —The Jews divided their law into the written and unwritten. The former contained the Pentateuch, πεντάτευχος, חמישה, חומשי, תורה, or the תורה שבכתב, verbum Dei scriptum, ἔγγραφος; the latter was handed down orally, the תורה שבעל פה, παράδοσις, verbum Dei non scriptum, ἄγραφος. Some Jews have assigned the same antiquity to both, alleging that Moses received them ῥon Mount Sinai, and that Joshua received the oral law from Moses, who transmitted it to the seventy elders; and these again transmitted it to the men of the Great Synagogue, the last of whom was Simon the Just (q.v.). From the men of the Great Synagogue it came into the possession of the rabbins till Judah the Holy (q. v), who embodied in the celebrated code, of traditional Jaw, or Mishna, all the authorized interpretations of the Mosaic law, the traditions and decisions of the learned, and the precedents of the courts or schools; or, as Moses Maimonides (q.v.) states, in his preface to the Mishna (Seder. Zeraim), "From Moses our teacher to our holy rabbi no one has united in a single body of doctrine what was publicly taught as the oral law; but an every generation the chief of the tribunal, or the prophet of his day, made memoranda of what he had heard from his predecessors and instructors, and communicated it orally to the people. In like manner, each individual committed to writing for his own use, and according to the degree of his ability, the oral laws and the information he had received respecting the interpretation of the Bible, with the various decisions that had been pronounced in every age and sanctified by the authority of the great tribunal. Such was the form of proceeding until our rabbi the holy, who first collected all the traditions, the judgments, the sentences, and the expositions of the law, heard by Moses our master, and taught in each generation." There is, no doubt, some truth in this as to a few elementary principles of Hebrew usage and practice, both civil and religious; but the whole of the unwritten law cannot have this primordial majesty, for, without referring to the trivial and foolish character of many of its appointments, we know that Midrashim, or explanations and amplifications of Biblical topics, were of gradual growth. Their commencement dates prior to the chronicle writer, because he refers to works of that nature (2Ch 13:22; 2Ch 24:27). The system of interpretation which they exemplify and embody existed in the age of the so called Sopherim, or scribes, who took the place of the prophets. — The men of the Great Synagogue promoted at. It prevailed from the Asmonsean period till that of Hadrian, i.e. about 300 years. The Midrash was naturally simple at first, but it soon grew more comprehensive and complicated under a variety of influences, of which controversy was not the least powerful. When secret meanings, hidden wisdom, deep knowledge, were sought in the letter of Scripture, the Midrashim shaped themselves accordingly, and a distinction in their contents could be made. Thus they have been divided into the Halakah, הלכה, "the rule," and Hagadâh, הגדה, "what is said." Legal prescriptions formed the Halakah, free interpretations the Hagadah. The one, as a rule of conduct, must be attended to; the other merely passed for something said. The one was permanent and proceeded from authoritative sources, from schools, the teachers of the law, etc.; the other was the product of individual minds, consisting of ideas which had often no other object than of being expressed at the moment. The oldest collection of Halakoth that is, the oldest Mishna-proceeded from the school of Hillel. Rabbi Akiba, who was slain in the Hadrianic war, is said to have composed Mishnic regulations. The school of R. Simon ben-Gamaliel (q.v.), A.D.

166, who was a descendant of Hillel, collected and sifted the existing materials of the oral law. The present Mishna proceeded from the hands of R. Judah the Holy (q.v.), son and successor of R. Simon ben-Gamaliel. The title of Judah's work is simply Mishnah, משנה, δευτέρωσις (from שנה, "to repeat"), "repetition," like the Arabic Mathani (Koran, 15:87; 39:34), that is, either (considering the divine law as twofold, written and traditional) the second branch of the twofold law, or else the law given in a second form, as an explicative and practical development of it (comp. Gratz, Gesch. d. Juden, 4:419).