A Class-Book of Biblical History and Geography / with numerous maps

by H. S. Osborn

7. For many years before the Christian era the Sanhedrin was the highest authority in matters of faith, and its utterances, or more particularly those of the most learned of its members, both in traditions and in opinions, became so numerous that from being only orally delivered, they were committed to writing, and these writings and opinions upon the Law were the foundation of that voluminous work called the Talmud, with its divisions.

FORM OF THE TALMUD.

8. The Talmud therefore in the main was the growth of centuries, beginning from about B. C. 220to several centuries after Christ. It was composed of the text of the Law, both the written law and that which was believed to be additional law, although only handed down from age to age, but never written. This was called the oral law. All this comprised that part of the Talmud called “the repetition,” or in the Hebrew the Mishna. Then came the “Commentary” upon every part, and this was called the Gamara.

THE BABYLONIAN TALMUD.

9. As there had been a very large and learned class of Jews in Babylon from the Captivity to the time of Christ, there was also a corresponding number of very important schools in several cities on the Euphrates and east of it. These also gathered a Talmud, with its Mishna and Gamara; but this—called the Babylonian Talmud—was of later origin than the Jerusalem Talmud.

A WONDERFUL MEMORY.

10. The various traditions which in all variety of expression, as unwritten laws, as commentaries and opinions, went to make up the Talmud, with its Mishna and Gamara, had remained unwritten for generations because there was a rule given out by some of their learned men and teachers that “things delivered by word of mouth must not be recorded.” But about A. D. 180 one of the most influential and wisest of their number, Rabbi Jehudah,decided that the time had come when the Mishna must be committed to writing. Rabbi Jehudah, for whom the greatest veneration existed, began with his fellow-laborers the heavy task of reducing all these traditions and decisions of many generations to a written form, and this work was performed at Tiberias (on the lake of the same name, 70 miles north of Jerusalem),where a celebrated school existed after Titus had destroyed Jerusalem.[146] It is a memorable fact that for nearly four centuries the vast amount of literature which composed the Talmud had been stored only in the memory of the learned members of the Jewish nation.

11. The vastness of this labor of memorial possession may be comprehended in some degreewhen we learn that of only one rabbi[147] 300 magisterial sentences are recorded in the Talmud,and years before his time Rabbi Hillel[148] reduced 600 or 700 sections, which had been known before only in a complicated mass, into orders, divisions, chapters, and verses, whereby they could be better memorized.

12. Although this cultivation of the memory was carried on to a very great extent among the Jews during one or two centuries before the Christian era, and to a degree unexcelled by any othernation, there are evidences that long before the Captivity the cultivation of the memory was largely encouraged.

13. Manuscripts were rare and costly, and therefore methods were adopted, as in the composition of several of the Psalms, of Proverbs, and Lamentations, which were aids to memorizing. One method was by beginning consecutive verses or sections with consecutive letters of the alphabet. Psalm 119 is composed of 176 verses, divided into a number of sections, the whole number of sections equal to the letters in the Hebrew alphabet (22), and all the eight verses of each section begin with the same letter. In Proverbs 31:10–31, the initial letters of all the verses follow the order of the Hebrew alphabet. The Lamentations of Jeremiah are composed in five poems, each, excepting the third, consisting of 22 sections or verses, a verse for each letter in the alphabet. The first four poems begin with the first letter of the alphabet, and in each poem, which makes one chapter, the after sections continue in their initial letters to follow the order of the alphabet. In the third chapter however the stanzas are in sets of three of the Bible verses, and each verse in the set begins with the same letter of the alphabet, but all the sets are in the alphabetical order. Such methods suggest the work of memorizing.