The Mishneh Torah of Maimonides

By the twelfth century the Talmud had become an ocean: anyone who wanted a simple answer — how to separate challah, what to do with lost property — had to work through dozens of folios of Aramaic argument, and not every rabbi could. Maimonides set himself a goal he stated plainly: that a person should read the Written Torah, then this book, and know the entire Oral Torah without needing any other book between them.

He worked about ten years, finishing around 4940. The Mishneh Torah has fourteen books — hence its other name, Yad HaChazakah, since the numerical value of yad is fourteen — a thousand chapters arranged by subject: prayer, Shabbat, marriage, courts, testimony, kings, the Temple, offerings, purity. It is written not in Aramaic but in the clear Hebrew of the Mishnah. And it contains no debate: only the final law, without 'Rabbi so-and-so said.'

The daring was twofold. He included what no code had contained: the laws of faith, of character and health, and the laws of the Temple and its offerings, irrelevant in exile because the Temple will yet be built. And the absence of sources provoked a storm: the Raavad of Posquières appended sharp notes — that he had abandoned the way of all before him. They are printed beside the text to this day.