Among the absurd notions as to what the Talmud was, given credence in
the Middle Ages, one was that it was a man! The mediaeval priest or
peasant was perhaps wiser than he knew. Almost, might we say, the Talmud
was Man, for it is a record of the doings, the beliefs, the usages, the
hopes, the sufferings, the patience, the humor, the mentality, and the
morality of the Jewish people for half a millennium.
What is the Talmud? There is more than one answer. Ostensibly it is the
_corpus juris_ of the Jews from about the first century before the
Christian era to about the fourth after it. But we shall see as we
proceed that the Talmud was much more than this. The very word "Law" in
Hebrew--"Torah"--means more than its translation would imply. The Jew
interpreted his whole religion in terms of law. It is his name in fact
for the Bible's first five books--the Pentateuch. To explain what the
Talmud is we must first explain the theory of its growth more remarkable
perhaps than the work itself. What was that theory? The Divine Law was
revealed to Moses, not only through the Commands that were found written
in the Bible, but also through all the later rules and regulations of
post-exilic days. These additional laws it was presumed were handed down
orally from Moses to Joshua, thence to the Prophets, and later still
transmitted to the Scribes, and eventually to the Rabbis. The reason why
the Rabbis ascribed to Moses the laws that they later evolved, was due
to their intense reverence for Scripture, and their modest sense of
their own authority and qualification. "If the men of old were giants
then we are pigmies," said they. They felt and believed that all duty
for the guidance of man was found in the Bible either directly or
inferentially. Their motto was then, "Search the Scriptures," and they
did search them with a literalness and a painstaking thoroughness never
since repeated. Not a word, not a letter escaped them. Every redundancy
of expression was freighted with meaning, every repetition was made to
give birth to new truth. Some of the inferences were logical and
natural, some artificial and far-fetched, but all ingenious. Sometimes
the method was inductive and sometimes deductive. That is, occasionally
a needed law was promulgated by the Jewish Sanhedrin, and then its
authority sought in the Scripture, or the Scripture would be sought in
the first instance to reveal new law.
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