The Completion of the Babylonian Talmud

In 4260 Ravina son of Rav Huna died, and that is taken as the date the Talmud was sealed. The formula Rav Ashi and Ravina are the end of instruction is not a ban on thinking but a change of status: nothing said afterwards carries amoraic authority.

What resulted? Thirty-seven tractates, some two and a half thousand folio pages in the standard Vilna edition, a text in mixed Hebrew and Babylonian Aramaic, unvocalized and almost unpunctuated. Formally a commentary on the Mishnah; in fact the record of a conversation spanning centuries. Men separated by three hundred years argue, and the Talmud sets their words side by side as though they shared a room.

Roughly a third is not law but aggadah: stories, parables, medicine, astronomy, dreams, arguments about character and repentance. An analysis of the ox that gored a cow may break off into an account of a sage forgiving the man who wronged him.

The book's power lies in its incompleteness. It hands over no finished code; it teaches how to argue by rules. That is why it could travel everywhere: in Kairouan and Cordoba, in Mainz and Lublin, Jews studied the same pages and understood one another instantly. It was burned many times — in Paris in 5002, in Italy in 5313 — and copied out again. Its contents and order have not changed in fifteen hundred years; the familiar foliation goes back to Bomberg's Venice edition of the 1520s.