IB World Religions 6.3.1. Key Texts: Written Torah, Oral Torah, Mishnah and Talmud Notes

6.3.1. Key Texts: Written Torah, Oral Torah, Mishnah and Talmud

The Written Torah

1. Jews call the first five books of the Hebrew Bible the Torah she-bikhtav (the Written Torah), and the tradition holds that God gave it to Moses. The word Torah means teaching or instruction rather than law, though law fills much of it.
2. The five books are Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. Jews name them by their opening Hebrew words, so Genesis is Bereshit, in the beginning.
3. In the synagogue the text takes the form of a Sefer Torah, a parchment scroll copied by hand by a trained scribe, a sofer, with no vowel signs and no punctuation.
4. The tradition counts 613 mitzvot (commandments) in it, a figure the rabbis arrived at rather than one the text supplies. Jews of every movement treat this book as the foundation document of the b'rit (covenant).
5. The Written Torah sits inside the larger Tenakh, the Hebrew Bible, but its standing is higher than the rest of it. It is the only part read through in full every year in the synagogue.
6. Read on its own the text is often too compressed to follow. It forbids work on Shabbat without saying what work means, and it commands slaughtering animals in the manner God commanded Moses without recording any such command.

The Oral Torah

1. Beside the written text the tradition places the Torah she-be-al peh (the Oral Torah), the explanation Jews hold was given to Moses at Sinai and passed on by mouth rather than written down.
2. The tractate Pirkei Avot opens by tracing the chain of transmission. Moses received Torah at Sinai and handed it to Joshua, Joshua to the elders, the elders to the prophets, and the prophets to the men of the Great Assembly.
3. The Oral Torah's work is to make the written text usable. It supplies the 39 categories of forbidden Shabbat labour, the method of kosher slaughter, and the wording of the berachot (blessings).
4. Rabbinic teachers held that the two were given together and that neither is complete without the other, which is why Jews speak of a single dual Torah rather than a text plus a tradition.
5. Keeping it unwritten was deliberate for centuries. Learning by memory tied the explanation to a living teacher, and the rabbis held that what had been given orally should stay oral.
6. Not every Jewish group accepted it. The Sadducees of the Second Temple period, and the Karaites from the ninth century onwards, recognized only the written text, which is part of why the rabbis argued for the oral tradition so insistently.

The Mishnah

1. The Mishnah is the first written collection of the Oral Torah, edited in the land of Israel around 200 CE and credited by the tradition to Rabbi Judah the Prince, Yehudah ha-Nasi.
2. War and dispersal made memory unsafe. The Temple had been destroyed in 70 CE, the revolt led by Bar Kokhba was crushed by 135 CE, and the teachers who carried the tradition were dying with it.
3. Its six orders are Zeraim (seeds), Moed (appointed times), Nashim (women), Nezikin (damages), Kodashim (holy things) and Tohorot (purities), subdivided into 63 tractates.
4. The style is extremely terse. A ruling may run to one line, and it states the law without quoting the biblical verse behind it.
5. Disagreement is preserved rather than tidied away. Rulings carry the names of the rabbis who gave them, and rejected minority views stay on the record.
6. The Mishnah explains why it keeps them: a later court may need to rely on a minority opinion. The teachers of this period are called the Tannaim, the repeaters, because their task was to hold the tradition in memory.

Gemara and the two Talmuds

1. Once the Mishnah was fixed it became the object of study in its turn, and the rabbinic discussion of it is the Gemara, meaning completion.
2. The Gemara argues rather than summarizes. It asks which verse a Mishnah ruling rests on, whether it contradicts another ruling, how far it extends, and what the rabbi who disagreed would say.
3. Talmud means the Mishnah and the Gemara printed together, and there are two such compilations.
4. The Talmud Yerushalmi, the Jerusalem Talmud, was assembled in the land of Israel by about 400 CE and left unfinished as conditions there worsened.
5. The Talmud Bavli, the Babylonian Talmud, was assembled in the academies of Sura and Pumbedita by about 600 CE. It is far longer, and it is the one Jews mean when they say Talmud without qualifying the word.
6. Its range goes well past law. Alongside legal debate it carries medicine, astronomy, dream interpretation, biography, prayer and moral instruction, so it works as a library rather than a code.
7. The teachers of the Gemara are the Amoraim, the speakers. They debate largely in Aramaic, while the Mishnah passages they quote stay in Hebrew.

Bava Kama on damages

1. Bava Kama, the first gate, is the Talmudic tractate on damages. Its treatment of the person who injures another, at passages including 38b, is the standard place to watch a Jewish belief develop from the Bible through rabbinic discussion.
2. The Torah states the principle as eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot at Exodus 21:24, and repeats the formula at Leviticus 24:20 and Deuteronomy 19:21.
3. The rabbis of the Talmud read the verse as money. Their settled conclusion is that an injurer pays compensation, and Jewish courts have no record of blinding anyone.
4. They reach it by argument rather than assertion. One line compares the wording used for injury with wording used elsewhere for payment, and another points out that a blind man could not be blinded in return, so literal retaliation could never be applied evenly.
5. The Mishnah fixes five separate heads of payment: nezek, the injury itself, tza'ar, pain, ripui, medical costs, shevet, lost earnings, and boshet, humiliation.
6. Voices defending the plain sense of the verse are kept in the discussion. The Talmud records the reading it rejects beside the reading it accepts.
7. Jews use the passage to show the written and oral Torah working as one instrument. The verse fixes the principle that an injurer owes exactly what was taken, and the discussion settles what paying it can mean.

A page of Talmud

1. A printed Talmud page is a map of the argument's own history, and the standard layout comes from the Vilna edition produced by the Romm press in the 1880s.
2. The Mishnah and the Gemara sit at the centre of the page in a block of square Hebrew letters, without punctuation.
3. The inner margin carries Rashi, Rabbi Shlomo Yitzhaki of Troyes, who lived from 1040 to 1105. His commentary explains the words and follows the reasoning so closely that students read it line by line with the text.
4. The outer margin carries the Tosafot, the additions, written by Rashi's descendants and students in France and Germany, who argue with the Gemara and with Rashi himself.
5. Narrow columns at the sides send the reader elsewhere: to the biblical verse quoted, to parallel Talmud passages, and to the law codes, above all the Mishneh Torah of Maimonides, Moses ben Maimon, who lived from 1138 to 1204.
6. Pages are cited by leaf and side, so 38b is the reverse of leaf 38. The numbering is nearly identical across editions, which lets Jews anywhere open to the same page.
7. The layout states the tradition's claim about itself. Teachers separated by a thousand years share one page, and none of them closes the discussion.