What is the Gemara?

This brings us to post-biblical Jewish authority.

The great repository of Jewish opinion is the Talmud, to which we have already referred. It is a very complex congeries of ceremonial ordinances, moral tales, poetry, philosophy, grounded upon tradition. It forms the text-book of the Rabbinical Jews, and is divided into two parts, the Mishna (repetition, cf. Deuteronomy) or Text, written in a corrupted form of Hebrew, belonging to the second or third century A.C., and the Gemara (completion) or Commentary, written in Aramaic of a developed type, which is referred to the fourth and fifth centuries. The Jews commonly mean by 'Talmud' the Commentary alone, for this is in most esteem: an illustration of the strange but common fact that Commentaries in time override the authority of the Text they profess merely to explain. We may compare amongst the Hindoos the Mitakshara superseding the Institutes of Manu, in Islam the Hedaya being looked to rather than the Koran. So powerfully did the study of the Mishna operate upon the relations between Jews and Christians, that the Emperor Justinian thought fit to issue an edict (Novel 146) in which he enjoined the Jews to use the Scriptures in Greek or other languages, the better to understand them, and to discontinue their employment of the Mishna δευτέρωσις (deuterosis), which he described as 'an invention of men speaking from the earth alone and possessed of nothing divine.' This was in the year 553.

The Jewish Commentary again divides into the Palestinian, dating from the fourth, and the Babylonian, dating, if Deutsch were right, from the fifth century, representing the traditions respectively most in favour among the Jews of Palestine and of Babylonia.

We spoke, in our last article, of the division of Jews into two great classes:— the Hebrews, who spoke or used Aramaic; and the Grecians who spoke and used Greek. The latter seem to have disappeared soon after the publication of christianity. Those who were not absorbed into the church, gave up all their differences with other Jews, and were in no way distinguished from them. There were two centres about which they chiefly congregated. The one was at Tiberias in Galilee, within the Roman Empire; the other at Babylon, without it. At each of these places, schools of theology and literature flourished for many generations. From Tiberias there issued the Mishna, or second law; being in fact those very traditions, reduced to writing, against which our Lord had inveighed. This Mishna being regarded as itself a book to be reverenced; the doctors of Tiberias by degrees collected many notes and comments upon it, which form what is called the Gemara, i.e., supplement. And the Mishna and this gemara together, make up the first talmud (or doctrine) called the Jerusalem talmud, which was completed about the year A.D., 300.

About this time the school at Tiberias was losing its importance, and in its place rose up that of Babylon, where other and far more voluminous comments, making another gemara, were added to the mishna of Tiberias. And these make up the second or Babylon talmud — always meant, when the talmud only is mentioned — which was finished about the year A.D. 500.

Now in both these talmuds, written in Aramaic, there are a vast number of quotations from the Bible, which learned men have, with great labour, collected and compared with the Bible itself. They find the discrepancies quite unimportant.

We spoke, in our last article, of the division of Jews into two great classes:— the Hebrews, who spoke or used Aramaic; and the Grecians who spoke and used Greek. The latter seem to have disappeared soon after the publication of christianity. Those who were not absorbed into the church, gave up all their differences with other Jews, and were in no way distinguished from them. There were two centres about which they chiefly congregated. The one was at Tiberias in Galilee, within the Roman Empire; the other at Babylon, without it. At each of these places, schools of theology and literature flourished for many generations. From Tiberias there issued the Mishna, or second law; being in fact those very traditions, reduced to writing, against which our Lord had inveighed. This Mishna being regarded as itself a book to be reverenced; the doctors of Tiberias by degrees collected many notes and comments upon it, which form what is called the Gemara, i.e., supplement. And the Mishna and this gemara together, make up the first talmud (or doctrine) called the Jerusalem talmud, which was completed about the year A.D. 300.

About this time the school at Tiberias was losing its importance, and in its place rose up that of Babylon, where other and far more voluminous comments, making another gemara, were added to the mishna of Tiberias. And these make up the second or Babylon talmud — always meant, when the talmud only is mentioned — which was finished about the year A.D. 500.

Now in both these talmuds, written in Aramaic, there are a vast number of quotations from the Bible, which learned men have, with great labour, collected and compared with the Bible itself. They find the discrepancies quite unimportant.

The reviewer next sketches the growth of the vast mass of discussion and exegesis, which followed the collection of the Mishnah, and much of which afterwards entered the Talmud, as the Gemara or commentary on that text: and this in a double form — the Palestinian in East Aramaean toward the end of the fourth century, the Babylonian in West Aramaean which was not closed till about the beginning of the sixth century. But it is natural to tradition to add interminably; and so the Talmud in its turn led to new comments.

Two elements enter here (p. 451) into the apology: first, an apparent measure of shame with the desire to save the Jews from being absolutely tied to the Talmud; secondly, an effort to account by an extraneous cause for the plain fact that nothing else can compete with its authority as regulating the Jews in law and religion. "Only this much we will add, that the Talmud, as such, was never formally accepted by the nation by either General or Special Council. Its legal decisions, as derived from the highest authorities, certainly formed the basis of the religious law, the norm of all future decisions; as undoubtedly the Talmud is the most trustworthy canon of Jewish tradition. But its popularity is much more due to an extraneous cause. During the persecutions against the Jews in the Persian empire, under Jesdegerd II., Firuz, and Kobad, the schools were closed for about eighty years. The living development of the law being stopped, the book obtained a supreme authority, such as had probably never been dreamt of by its author."

At any rate, the post-captivity state of the Jews might be more truly called poverty-stricken than Puritan; and it was during this dearth, when the house was "empty" and "swept" that it had the "garnishing" of tradition — the ground-work of the Mishna, which is supposed to have been copied by R. Jehuda about the end of the second or the beginning of the third century. This in its turn gave rise to its "complement," or comment, the Gemara, of which two remain: that formed by the school of Tiberias, called the Jerusalem Talmud (one vol. folio), as the larger compilation founded by the school of Babylon is published as the Babylonian Talmud (12 vols. folio). It is hard to see why so great a mountain should be constructed out of matters so commonly known by all who take interest in the sons of Israel and their history. Dr. Edersheim has given a popular yet sufficiently exact compendium of all that most persons will care to know of the subject in his "History of the Jewish nation since the destruction of Jerusalem under Titus" (Edinburgh: Constable; London: Hamilton, Adams, & Co., 1856). The reader will find information both abundant and trustworthy in his pleasantly written book (already recommended in these pages) which sacrifices neither the glory of Christ, nor the truth of the Bible, but blends them with real love to the Jews.

The Talmud, which is a book of Jewish traditional teaching, means “instruction.” Right in the centre of the word Talmud you can see two of the consonants of Lamed. The numerical value of Lamed is thirty. This letter has therefore the significance of “teaching us to go on to maturity.”

They had occupied the legislative seat, and when their sect started it was with a zeal for the law, which God had given through Moses. Soon, however, they became corrupt. In that part of the Talmud which is called the Mishnah* it is stated that they were to be regarded as if put into that place by Moses himself, taking their places in his seat, and were to be obeyed, so far as outward observations were concerned. (The Talmud is composed of two parts, the Gemara and the Mishna. Mishna means "repetition," and was a repetition of the written law.)

The Rabbinical commentators such as Rashi (eleventh century), Maimonides (eleventh century), Ibn Ezra and Kimchi (thirteenth century), and Abarbanel (fifteenth century), generally follow the common Text. Ibn Ezra's and Kimchi's annotations are of most value: the influence of Kimchi's may be seen in our Authorised Version. They are in Rabbinical Bibles, as Buxtorf's, at the side of or underlying the text. Samples of such comments, with a vocabulary, may be found in Winer's 'Talmudic and Rabbinic Chrestomathy' and Bernard's 'Selections from Maimonides,' containing a Digest of Rabbinical phrases and abbreviations, is a most useful book. The language of the Mishna and Gemara has been shortly described by Renan, 'Histoire' (pp.157-61). There is no good English book upon the grammar of either, but there is one in German for the Mishna, by Geiger; and Samuel David Luzzatto, Professor at the Rabbinical Institute of Padua, wrote in Italian a Grammar of the Babylonian Gemara (1865), of which there has appeared a German edition by Kruger.

The best Lexicon for the Talmud and Rabbinic is Buxtorf's, edited by Fischer. Ibn Ezra on Isaiah has been translated by Friedlander, Kimchi on Zechariah by McCaul; whilst the commentaries of the latter on the Psalms and on Isaiah are available in Latin. The 'Yalkut' on Zechariah, being a collection of Rabbinical 'Hints' for interpretation, has been translated by King (1882). This last contains interesting appendices, 'A' being on 'Messiah ben Joseph' (see Gen. 49:22-26), and 'B' on 'The Jerusalem of the World to come' (cf. Ezek. 41), with elucidation of Eph. 2:14, 20-22.

From such hopes in both Testaments it is a descent to take up the account of Hillel and Akiba striving unsuccessfully to arrange the oral traditions of the Rabbis, or of the equivocal success of Jehuda "the saint," who is said to have reduced them, though still unwritten, to one code about A.D. 200.

For its use in the Jerusalem Talmud (Taanith, 656), see Streane's edition of Laible, pp. 10, 50.