The Talmuds Are NOT Bibles

I come from a secular Jewish background, so I used to think that when Jewish people told me they were “learning Torah,” they meant that they were studying the Bible.  It was only later in life that I discovered they were actually studying the Talmud. 

There are actually two Talmuds--the Jerusalem Talmud and the Babylonian Talmud, both of which are based on the Mishnah, which was compiled around 200 CE by Rabbi Judah the prince. Each Talmud consists of the Mishnah (which is the same in both Talmuds) plus a Gemara--a commentary on the Mishnah.  The Jerusalem Talmud was initially published in four volumes and the Babylonian Talmud consists of 73 volumes, but when people tell you they are “learning Torah” they are probably talking about studying the Babylonian Talmud.

Lawrence H. Schiffman is a highly respected Orthodox Jewish scholar.  In From Text to Tradition he writes that after the destruction of the Second Temple, there was, and I quote, “a fundamental change in Jewish study and learning” and that “The fundamental change was that the oral Torah gradually evolved into a fixed corpus of its own which eventually replaced the written Torah as the main object of Jewish study and guide for religious practice, at least for rabbinic Jews.”  

In “Judaism today is not biblical Judaism” Rabbi Israel Drazin summed up Schiffman’s book by saying, “It tells how and why Judaism accepted the hegemony and authority of the Babylonian Talmud over that of the Bible. It is the history of Judaism from Temple to house of study and synagogue, from Torah to Talmud, from priest to rabbi, from holy text to tradition.”

In Matthew 15:3, Jesus asked the Pharisees and scribes why they disobeyed the commandment of God because of their tradition.  Coming soon:  a blog on the importance of obeying God’s commandments.

Margot Armer