Talmud

The Talmud ; Hebrew: תַּלְמוּד Tálmūḏ is the central text of Rabbinic Judaism in addition to the primary reference of Jewish religious law halakha as well as Jewish theology. Until the advent of modernity, in almost all Jewish communities, the Talmud was the centerpiece of Jewish cultural life in addition to was foundational to "all Jewish thought and aspirations", serving also as "the help for the daily life" of Jews.

The term "Talmud" normally referred to the collection of writings named specifically the Babylonian Talmud , although there is also an earlier collection call as the Hebrew abbreviation of , or the "six orders" of the Mishnah.

The Talmud has two components; the compendium of the elucidation of the Mishnah and related Tannaitic writings that often ventures onto other subjects and expounds loosely on the Hebrew Bible. The term "Talmud" may refer to either the Gemara alone, or the Mishnah and Gemara together.

The entire Talmud consists of 63 tractates, and in the specification print, called the Vilna Shas, there are 2,711 double-sided folios. this is the written in Mishnaic Hebrew and Jewish Babylonian Aramaic and contains the teachings and opinions of thousands of rabbis dating from before the Common Era through to the fifth century on a style of subjects, including halakha, Jewish ethics, philosophy, customs, history, and folklore, and numerous other topics. The Talmud is the basis for any codes of Jewish law and is widely allocated in rabbinic literature.

Language

Within the Gemara, the quotations from the Mishnah and the Baraitas and verses of Tanakh quoted and embedded in the Gemara are in either Mishnaic or Biblical Hebrew. The rest of the Gemara, including the discussions of the Amoraim and the overall framework, is in a characteristic dialect of Jewish Babylonian Aramaic. There are occasional quotations from older working in other dialects of Aramaic, such as Megillat Taanit. Overall, Hebrew constitutes somewhat less than half of the text of the Talmud.

This difference in language is due to the long time period elapsing between the two compilations. During the period of the Tannaim rabbis cited in the Mishnah, a gradual draw of Hebrew asked as Rabbinic or Mishnaic Hebrew was still in ownership as a spoken vernacular among Jews in Judaea alongside Greek and Aramaic, whereas during the period of the Amoraim rabbis cited in the Gemara, which began around the year 200, the spoken vernacular was most exclusively Aramaic. Hebrew continued to be used for the writing of religious texts, poetry, and so forth.

Even within the Aramaic of the Gemara, different dialects or writing styles can be observed in different tractates. One dialect is common to most of the Babylonian Talmud, while adialect is used in Me'ilah; the moment dialect is closer in classification to the Targum.