RABBINIC JUDAISM 1. Before 70 CE and afterward 2. Pharisees, rabbis, synagogues 3. Mishnah, Gemara, Talmud 4. The orthodox path: Pirke Aboth 5. The unorthodox path: Elisha ben Abuyah

OK: so what is the Talmud?

Many years ago, I heard a religious-school teacher explain it this way:

"The Mishnah is a commentary on the Bible; the Talmud is a commentary on the Mishnah."

There are a few things about that statement that are wrong. The Mishnah is not really a commentary on the Bible; you'll have to be patient with me until I get a chance to explain what it is. There's also a lot that has to be added if the statement is going to be useful. But, when you're first trying to get a handle on the complex and elusive subject of the rabbinic literature, it's not a bad starting point. In particular, it introduces you to the three central texts revered by rabbinic Judaism, in their proper sequence: the Tanach, the Mishnah, and the Talmud.

Let's add a few dates to it. The Tanach is a vast library of texts, spanning centuries, from the eighth century BCE (or possibly even earlier) to the second century BCE. The Mishnah was put in its present form in Palestine, early in the third century CE, by a group of Palestinian rabbis led by a man named Rabbi Judah the Patriarch ("Judah ha-Nasi"; see Goldberg and Rayner, pp. 83-84). You may remember that the rabbinic movement was led by a line of hereditary "patriarchs," descended from the Patriarch Gamaliel II, whom I've referred to as the "popes" of rabbinic Judaism; to refresh your memory on this point, click here. Judah the Patriarch was one of the most distiguished members of this line, and his great achievement was the editing (the word Goldberg and Rayner use is "redaction") of the Mishnah.

As for the Talmud--well, there are really two Talmuds, and each of them is a commentary on the Mishnah. Or, more exactly, the Gemara is a commentary on the Mishnah, and the Mishnah and the Gemara together constitute the Talmud. There is a Palestinian Gemara, edited early in the fifth century CE on the basis of the oral discussions of the Mishnah in the Palestinian rabbinic academies, and arranged as a great commentary on the Mishnah. There is a Babylonian Gemara, edited in the course of the sixth century CE on the basis of the oral discussions of the Mishnah in the Babylonian rabbinic academies, and--just like its Palestinian counterpart--arranged as a great commentary on the Mishnah. The Palestinian Gemara, taken together with the Mishnah, constitutes the Palestinian Talmud. The Babylonian Gemara, taken together with that same core text, the Mishnah, constitutes the Babylonian Talmud.

I often condense the preceding paragraph into a set of equations:

M + pG = pT

M + bG = bT

Meaning: the Mishnah, plus the Palestinian Gemara (=commentary on the Mishnah), makes up the Palestinian Talmud; the Mishnah, plus the Babylonian Gemara (=commentary on the Mishnah), makes up the Babylonian Talmud.

"So there are really two Talmuds?" you say. Yes, there are.

"But don't we speak of the Talmud?" you say. Yes, we do.

The reason for this is that, over the centuries, the Babylonian Talmud became the more authoritative of the two Talmuds. The Palestinian Talmud, which is much shorter than the Babylonian and much harder to understand, became neglected and forsaken. Nowadays the Palestinian Talmud is mostly of interest to specialized scholars, particularly historians of ancient Judaism, for whom it is a historical source of the highest importance. It is the Babylonian Talmud--not the Palestinian--that is the Talmud, the focus of the intellectualized piety that is the center of rabbinic Judaism. When Danny and Reuven, in The Chosen, talk about studying "the Talmud," they mean the Babylonian Talmud.

(Yet Reuven makes good use of the Palestinian Talmud in his studies in Chapter Fourteen of The Chosen, and even better use of it in his dramatic performance on his examination for rabbinical ordination, in The Promise. This is because he is the son of David Malter, a Talmud scholar with a modern historical-critical orientation. For scholars of this sort--unlike the more traditional Talmud scholars--the Palestinian Talmud is a vital historical source that deserves the closest possible attention.)

Often, by the way, you will see the Babylonian Talmud referred to as the Bavli (the Hebrew word for "Babylonian"), and the Palestinian Talmud referred to as the Yerushalmi (the Hebrew word for "Jerusalemite"). This last title is a misnomer: the Palestinian Talmud indeed took shape in Palestine, but not in Jerusalem, from which Jews had been banished ever since the Bar Kochba revolt in 135 CE. It was mostly the rabbis in northern Palestinian towns, like Tiberias and Caesarea, who created the Palestinian Talmud.

So far I've given you details on the two Talmuds, and told you that the Babylonian Talmud is the Talmud, par excellence. But you still won't be able to understand what the Talmud is unless you understand what is contained in its core text, the Mishnah.

I've said earlier that the Mishnah is not really a commentary on the Tanach. The ancient rabbis did create commentaries on the Tanach; these are known as Midrashim (singular, Midrash). There is a rabbinic Midrash on the Book of Genesis, one on the Book of Exodus, and so forth.[1] The building blocks of these midrashic texts are individual expositions, also called midrashim--I'll write the word this time with a lower-case m--of this or that Biblical passage. These "lower-case" midrashim are often found in the Palestinian or the Babylonian Gemara, and there are some midrashim contained in the Mishnah itself. But the Mishnah, overall, is not a Midrash; that is, it is not a book written to interpret the Bible.

What, then, is the Mishnah?

Overall, it is the traditional common-law of Judaism, as this was practiced, remembered, or imagined by the Palestinian rabbis of the late first century, second century, and early third century CE.

Early in the third century, Rabbi Judah the Patriarch and his colleagues organized and systematized this common-law, arranging it according to six main topics, which are called "orders." The first "order" of the Mishnah consists of the laws related to agriculture. The second "order" is the laws of the Sabbath and festivals; the third is the laws related to marriage and divorce; the fourth is the civil law; the fifth is the sacrificial law; and the sixth is the laws relating to pure and impure foods and objects.

(The six "orders" of the Mishnah are subdivided into a total of 63 "tractates," which, like the orders, are topically arranged. Thus, the order of "festivals" contains such tractates as Shabbat ["Sabbath"], Pesahim ["Passover"], Rosh Hashanah, and Yoma ["Yom Kippur," the Day of Atonement].)

This common-law is partly rooted in the Bible, and surely rests to a large extent upon midrashim of one Biblical text or another. The tractate Yoma, which I mentioned in the last paragraph, sets forth a fascinating account of the Temple ritual for the Day of Atonement that reads like a mixture of historical memory and midrashically-based fantasy. It's obvious that the entire fifth order of the Mishnah, the laws of sacrifice, are based either on midrash or on some dim recollections of how the sacrifices were performed in the Second Temple. (There certainly weren't any sacrifices being offered by the second-century rabbis who created the Mishnah!)

But we mustn't ignore the possibility that other parts of the Mishnah reflect the way Judaism was practiced among Palestinian Jews in the second century, perhaps going back to the practices of the Pharisees and their followers in the first century and even earlier.

For example: If you read the Mishnaic laws of the Sabbath (collected in tractate Shabbat, "Sabbath," in the "order" of the Mishnah that deals with the festivals), you'll be struck at all the elaborate and detailed dos and don'ts, which go very far beyond the terse and poorly defined Biblical command to "rest." It is hard to avoid the impression that what is being laid out in the Mishnah is the practice of how the Sabbath was observed in second-century Palestine. This practice was surely rooted in the customs of Biblical times. But it was just as surely not inferred by scholastic deduction from the Biblical Sabbath commandments.

The ancient rabbis themselves were conscious of this. "The laws of the Sabbath," they said, "... are like mountains hanging by a hair: a tiny bit of Scripture, a multiplicity of laws."[2] They might devote a very fair amount of energy to trying to prop up their traditional Sabbath laws by strained and tortured interpretations of a few Biblical passages. (Midrashic interpretation tends often to play fast and loose with the Biblical text.) But at the end of the day the rabbis had to admit: they had their Sabbath practices from tradition--which meant, the way everyone seemed to remember things always having been done--and not from Bible study.

A story in the Gospels (Matthew 15:1-20, Mark 7:1-23) represents the Pharisees as rebuking Jesus because his disciples don't follow the "tradition of the elders." Jesus's response is to denounce the Pharisees' "tradition," and to argue that their "tradition" is in open contradiction to Moses's Torah. "For the sake of your tradition," he tells them in Matthew 15:6, "you have made void the word of God" --that is, the Torah.

The Pharisees, and the rabbis after them, couldn't have disagreed with Jesus more. For them the tradition, handed down through generations of communal teaching and practice, was an essential supplement to the Five Books of Moses. So important, so indispensable was it in their eyes, that they elevated it to the status of a second Torah, which they called the "Oral Torah."

Moses, according to rabbinic theory, was given two Torahs on Mount Sinai. One of these was the "Written Torah," the Pentateuch. The other was the "Oral Torah," handed down through the generations--never identical to any written text, and therefore never to be pinned down in any book, but preserved somewhere within the traditions and debates recorded in the Mishnah and afterward in the Gemara.

It is of this "Oral Torah"--not the "Written Torah," the Five Books of Moses--that the beginning of the Mishnah tractate Pirke Aboth speaks when it says:

"Moses received the Torah on Sinai, and handed it down to Joshua; Joshua to the elders; the elders to the prophets; and the prophets handed it down to the Men of the Great Assembly. ... Simon the Just was one of the last survivors of the Great Assembly. ... Antigonos of Socho received the tradition from Simon the Just ... "

And so on, down through Hillel at the beginning of the first century CE and Yochanan ben Zakkai at the end of the first century; and then through Yochanan's disciples to the second-century rabbis, and from them to Judah the Patriarch. Pirke Aboth is mostly of interest to us as a convenient digest of the ethics of rabbinic Judaism. But it also provides, especially in its opening chapters, a history (partly real, partly fantasized) of the transmission of the "tradition," a.k.a. the Oral Torah.

What exactly is the Oral Torah? Class after class of students have asked me this question, and I've never been sure that I've been able to answer clearly. The truth is that the concept of the Oral Torah--or, as I'd prefer to say, the myth of the Oral Torah--is one of the most complex, paradoxical, and elusive ideas in all rabbinic thought. Perhaps the best way to understand it is not to describe it in modern language, but to listen to the rabbis themselves talk about it.

Paradox: The Oral Torah was given by God to Moses, but Moses himself couldn't have recognized it. The rabbis tell us this in an amazing story in the Babylonian Talmud (Menahot 29b), in which Moses miraculously finds himself seated in the school of the second-century rabbi Akiba. Moses listens to Akiba and his students discussing Torah, "and he didn't have the slightest idea what they were talking about! He felt dizzy. Finally [Akiba] arrived at a certain topic, and his students said to him, 'Rabbi, how do you know this?' And [Akiba] replied, 'It is a law given to Moses at Sinai'--whereupon [Moses] was comforted."

Paradox: The Oral Torah is ancient, yet emerges even from present-day classroom discussions. So the Palestinian Talmud: "Scripture, Mishnah, Talmud, homiletics--even the legal rulings that will in the future be offered by a seasoned student for his teacher's approbation--all of this was already revealed to Moses at Sinai" (Peah 2:5, 13a).

This sense of the timelessness of Oral Torah is reflected in the Babylonian Talmud, Sukkah 28a, where we are told that Yochanan ben Zakkai studied the legal debates of Abaye and Rava. Literally speaking, this is impossible: Abaye and Rava were Babylonian rabbis who lived in the early fourth century, more than two hundred years after Yochanan ben Zakkai. But their debates are part of the Oral Torah, and therefore existed in potential for centuries before either of them was born.

And compare the Mishnah, Yadayim 4:3: The rabbis at Yavneh discuss, on purely rational grounds, the recondite legal question of which tithe is to be paid in the Sabbatical year by the Jews of Transjordan. Eventually they take a vote, and decide it is to be the Poorman's Tithe. (I won't even try to explain the legal issues involved. They are not germane to my point.) One of the rabbis afterwards tells Rabbi Eliezer, who was not present for the proceedings,[3] the result of the vote.

"Rabbi Eliezer broke into tears. He said: 'God's mystery belongs to those who fear Him, to make known to them His covenant [Psalm 25:14]. Go and tell the rabbis: Have no fear about your vote! For I have it as a tradition from Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai, who heard it from his teacher, and his teacher from his teacher, going back to a law given to Moses at Sinai, that the Jews of Transjordan pay Poorman's Tithe in the Sabbatical year.' "

Paradox: The Oral Torah, although in fact found in written texts like the Mishnah and Talmud, is in theory reserved for oral transmission.

"Moses wanted the Mishnah to be written down [just like the Pentateuch]. But God foresaw that in the future the Gentiles would translate the Torah and read it in Greek, and would say, 'We are Israel! ... We are the children of God!' God says to the Gentiles, 'How can you say you are My children? I recognize as My children only those who possess My mystery ... namely, the Mishnah.' " (Midrash Pesikta Rabbati, 5:1)

This is obviously a jab at the Christians, who read the Torah in Greek translation and claimed to be the true Israel and the children of God. Had the Mishnah been written down, they could have translated it and stolen it from the Jews just as they stole the Bible. But the Mishnah is, at least theoretically, oral. It therefore remains God's "mystery" known only to His legitimate children.

Finally, there's a story in one midrashic text that brilliantly illustrates the rabbinic theory of the Oral Torah, and why the Written Torah is meaningless without it:

"A certain man ... came before Hillel and said to him: 'Master, how many Torahs were given?'

'Two,' Hillel replied, 'one written and one oral.'

Said the man: 'The written one I am prepared to accept, the oral one I am not prepared to accept.'

'My son,' Hillel said to him, 'sit down.'

He wrote out the alphabet for him (and pointing to one of the letters) asked him: 'What is this?'

'It is aleph,' the man replied.

Said Hillel: 'This is not aleph but bet. What is that?' he continued.

The man answered: 'It is bet.'

'This is not bet,' said Hillel, 'but gimmel.'

(In the end) Hillel said to him: 'How dost thou know that this is aleph and this bet and this gimmel? Only because our ancestors of hold handed it down to us that this is aleph and this bet and this gimmel. Even as thou hast taken this in good faith, so take the other in good faith.' "[4]

In other words: just as the alphabet is an incomprehensible scribble without an accompanying oral tradition, so the Written Torah.

Reread Matthew 15:1-20 and Mark 7:1-23. You will now see plainly that the story of Hillel you have just read is the rabbis' answer to Christian attacks of this kind.

Would you like to know more about the Talmud, considered both as a literary work and as a physical object (that is, a printed book)? Then click here for the excellent Web page "A Page from the Babylonian Talmud," constructed by my old friend Professor Eliezer Segal of the University of Calgary, and follow the instructions there. (Eliezer has a linked page on the Mishnah, which you will find by following his instructions.)

I strongly urge you to spend a while browsing around Eliezer's site. When you're finished, click here, and we'll go on to read one of the most important and historically influential of all the rabbinic texts ... .

1. Before 70 CE and afterward
2. Pharisees, rabbis, synagogues
3. Mishnah, Gemara, Talmud (go back to the top)
4. The orthodox path: Pirke Aboth
5. The unorthodox path: Elisha ben Abuyah

[1] There exist Midrashim--that is, complete midrashic works--to the five books of the Pentateuch, plus the five short books in the "Writings" that Jews call the "Five Scrolls" (Song of Songs, Ruth, Lamentations, Ecclesiastes, Esther); also on the books of Samuel, Psalms and Proverbs. There is no "Midrash to Jeremiah", for example, or "Midrash to Job." There are plenty of midrashim to individual verses of Jeremiah, Job, and every other book of the Tanach. It's just that these individual midrashim (lower-case) haven't been edited together into organized Midrashim (upper-case) on the entire book. [Go back to text.]

[2] Mishnah, Hagigah 1:8. [Go back to text.]

[3] Presumably because he had been excommunicated; see the Babylonian Talmud, Bava Metzia 59b. [Go back to text.]

[4] Fathers According to Rabbi Nathan, ch. 15, translated by Judah Goldin, p. 80. [Go back to text.]