Talmud ("Ilwbri, talmuJ, doctrine; from "Ip^, "to teach"). The Talmud, "that wonderful monument of human industry, human wisdom, and human folly" Olilman), is the work which embodies the canonical an<l civil laws of the .Tews. It consists of a Mishna (([. V.) as text, and a voluminous collection of commen-
Supposed Egyptian Figure and Name of Taliuai.
TALMUD
167
TALMUD
taries and illustrations, called in the more modern He- brew lloraa, and in Aramaic Geiiiara, '• the comple- ment" or "completion," from ^p5, "to make perfect." Hence the men wlio delivered these decisive commen- taries are called Gemarists, sometimes Hora'im, but more commonly Amoraim.
I. History and Composition. — The Jews divided their law into the written and unwritten. The former con- tained the Pentateuch, 7r£j'rrtr£(>;\;«c,-, niU'^'On, ilI3'2*n min, or the nnri'J min, verhum Dei scriptum, iyypa<poi;\ the latter was handed down orally, the ns b"2'J iTiin, TTcipaSnmi; verhum Dei non scrip- turn, dypci'poq. Some Jews have assigned the same antiquity to both, alleging that Moses received them ou Mount Sinai, and that .Joshua received the oral law from Jloses, who transmitted it to the seventy elders; and these again transmitted it to tlie 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 Jiulah the Holy (q. v), who embodied in the celebrated code of traditional law, or JMishna, 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 ((|. v.) states, iu his preface to the Mishua {Seder Zeraim), " From Jloses 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 iu every generation the chief of the tribunal, or the prophet of his day, made memoranda of what he had lieard from his predecessors and instructors, and com- municated it orally to the peoi^le. Iu liUe manner, each individual committed to writing for his own use, and according to the degree of his ability, tlio oral laws and the information he had received respecting the inter- pretation of the Bible, with tiie various decisions that liad been pronounced in every age and sanctilied by the authority of the great tribunal. Such was the form of jiroceeding until our rabbi the holy, who lirst 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 He- brew usage and practice, both civil and religious; but the whole of the unwritten law cannot have this pri- mordial majesty, for, without referring to the trivial and foolish character of many of its appointments, we know thrit Midrasliira, or explanations and amplitications of liiblical topics, were of gradual growth. Their com- mencement dates prior to the chronicle writer, because he refers to works of that nature (2 Chron. xiii, 22; xxiv, 27). The system of interpretation which they exemplify and embody existed in the age of the so- called Sopheriin, or scribes, who took the place of the prophets. The men of the Great Synagogue promoted ir. It prevailed from the Asmonajan period till that of Hadrian, i.e. about 300 years. The Midrash was nat- urally simple at first, but it soon grew more comprehen- sive and complicated under a varietj' of influences, of which controversy was not the least powerfid. Wiien secret meanings, hidden wisdom, deep knowledge, were sought in the letter of Scripture, the jNIidrashim shaped themselves accordingly, and a distinction in their con- tents could be made. Thus they have been divided into the Halakah, ri35n, "the ride," and liaguddh, il^jtil, "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 regidatious. The school of II. Simon ben-(iamaliel (q. v.), A.D. 16(5, who was a de- scendant of Hillel, collected and sifted the existing ma- terials of the oral law. The present IMishna proceeded from the hands of K. Jiulah the Holy (q. v.), son and successor of K. Simon ben-(iamaliel. The title of Ju- dah's work is simpl}' Mishndh, 1^'i'^'O, StvTfpojaig (from nyj, " to repeat"), " repetition," like the Arabic Mathani (Koran, xv, 87 ; xxxix, 34), that is, either (consider- ing 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 practi- cal development of it (comp. Grittz, Gesch. d. Juden, iv, 419).
The work itself is composed of the following ele- ments :
1. Pure Mishndh {'H.'Z'O^), the elucidation of the fuiula- mental text of the Mosaic laws, and their application to au endless variety of particular cases and circumstauces not mentioned in them.