TALMUD
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TALMUD
lawful until the moiniiig di\wn aii^=eth, and so everything which may he ealeu on ihe same day il is allowed to eat until the inoining dawn ariseth. If this is so, why do the wise say ' till midnight ?' In ordei- that men may he held far away from sin."
Gemam.— "The Thanna (i.e. rabhi ,Tndah the Holy), what is his authority that he teaches, from what time on- ward? And, besides that, why does lie teach on the even- ing first, and might he teach on Ihe morning tirst? The Thanna rests on the Scripture, for it is written, 'When thou liest down and when llioii risest up,' and so he teaches, the time of reciting tlie Slieuia, when thou liest down, when is it? Prom the time when the priests go iu to eat of their oblation. But if thou wilt, say I, he hath taken it out of the creation of the world, for it is said it was evening and it was morning one day. If this is so, it might be the last Mishna which teaches. In the morn- ing are said two blessings befoi-e and one after, and in the evening two before and two after, and yet they teach iu the evening first. The Thanna begins in the evening, then he teaches in the morning: as he treats of the morn- inir, si> he explains the things of the morning, and then he explains the things o{ the evening."
This is less than one fourth part of the comment in the Gemara on that passage in tiie IMishna, and the re- mainder is equally lucid and interesting.
Subsidiaries to the Talmud, printed either in the margin of the pages or at the end of the treatises, are
(1) the Tosaphoth, exegetical additions by later authors;
(2) ifasonth ha-shesh Sedarim, being marginal Maso- retic indices to the six orders of the Mishna; (3) A'iii or En-Mis/ipaf, i. e. index of places on the rites and in- stitutions; (4) Ner Mifsrat/i, a general index of de- cisions according to the digest of Maimonides; and (5) Perushim. or cominentaries by different anthors.
IV. Literary Uses. — The Talmud has been applied to the criticism and interpretation of the Old Test. Most of its citations, however, agree \rith the present Maso- retic text. It has probably been conformed to the Mas- oretic standard by the rabl)ins, at least in the later edi- tions. For variations, see tlie art. Quotation's of the Old Test, in the Talmiu); for the interpretation, see the art. Scuiptuke iNTEuriiETATiON among the Jews.
The Talmud has also been used in the illustration of the New Test. Iiy TJghtfoot, Schiittgen, Meuschen, Wett- stein, Gfriirer, Robertson, Nork, Delitzscb, Wiinsche. But in this department, also, its utility has been over- estimated, and b_v none more than by Lightfoot himself, who says, in the dedication prefixed to his Talmudical exercitations, "Christians, by their skill and industry, may render them (the Talraudic writings) most useful- ly serviceable to their students, and most eminently tending to the interpretations of the New Test." But not so Isaac Yossius, who said Lightfoot would have sinned less by illustrating the evangelists from the Koran than these nebnlis r(thbi>iic(v, and exclaimed, " Sit modus ineptiendi et cessent tandem aliquando miseri Christiani Judaicis istiusmodi fidere fabellis!" ("Let Christians at length cease from playing the fool and trusting to such wretched Jewish fables as those con- tained in the Talmud!") The mistake of Lightfoot is repeated by Wiinsche, in his Nene Beitrdfie zur Erldute- rung der Enangelien ans Tttlmitd tind Midrosh (Gfitt. 1878 ), whose modus illustrandi et interpretondi is like a Jew writing an apology for Judaism ; hence great caution must be exhibited in the perusal of the latter's work. There is only one wav of using the Talmud for the New Test., for which see our art. Skk.mon on the MoiNT AND the Talmud.
For the Old Test, as it was in the time of the Tal- mud, see the next article.
V. Apparatus /or Study of the Talmud. — 1. Mami- scripts.— Like the text of the Old Test., the Talmud was copied with the greatest care during the Middle Ages ; but, like a good many other works, these MSS. have become the prey of time, and only a few of them are extant. All that is known is (1) the first division of the Jerusalem Talmud in possession of the Jewish congre- gation at Constantinople; (2) a complete copy of the Babylonian Talmud from the year 1343 in the Koyal Li-
brary at Munich ; (3) a fragment of the same, evident- ly older than No. 2, in the same place; (4) a fragment of the same from the year 1134 in the Hamburg City Library; (5) the treatise San/iedrin according to the Babj'lonian rcdactitin, and belonging to the 12th centu- ry, in the Ducal Library at Carlsriihe; ((>) some frag- ments with valuable variations, preserved at the Uni- versity Lilirary of Breslau. There is no doidit that in some libraries fragments may yet be found, if the covers of old books should be properly examined, for which they have been used by ignorant binders. That such was the case we not oidy know from the fragments at the Breslau LTniversity, but from a more recent discov- ery of W. H. Lowe, who published the Frarpnent of the Talmud Bahli I'esachiiii of the 9//t or lO/A Century, in the Uviversity Library at Cambridge, with Notes and a Facsimile (Lond. 1879).