What is the Talmud?

Q. I am writing a paper for school on the Talmud. What is it, and what do halakah, hagadah, midrash mean because I am coming across these terms and it is confusing?

A. I am going to explain these things in the simplest terms I can. The Talmud means ‘Teaching” and also can mean “learning”. The term “disciple” is “talmid” which means a student and both words are related. The Talmud is the overall collection of Jewish thought, based on how the Pharisees saw things. In the 1st century, there was no such thing as Judaism, there was “Judaisms”.

You had Pharisees, Sadducees, Asia-Minor Jews, Hellenistic Jews, Zealots, Sicaari, Essenes and the Nazarenes to name a few and they all had different ways of doing some things. After the destruction of the Temple in 70 A.D. the Pharisees, who were friends with the Romans, got permission to set up an academy in Yavneh where the Pharisaical sages reformulated their form of Judaism, and” Rabbinical Judaism” was formed which we see today. They put together Jewish thought and eventually things were formulated into a “talmud”. There is the Jerusalem Talmud and the Babylonian Talmud because these were the Jewish centers of learning for hundreds of years.

The Talmud has all sorts of information collected in it, like a big encyclopedia. There are some good things and some bad things in it. It is not, as some say, the Jewish Bible and all Jews believe everything in it no more than all Christians believe in David Koresh’s writings or Benny Hinn’s. A Christian ‘talmud” would’ve included what they had to say if one was put together. The Talmud comments on three basic areas called the midrash, halakah and hagadah. Hagadah means “the telling, storytelling” like parables. Yeshua was a haggadic rabbi because he taught in parables. Halakah is “how to walk” in the commandments. Midrash means “an interpretation” of the scripture at least. So the Talmud is a collection of rabbinical thought by stories, how to walk in commandments and interpretations of things found in the word.

Some are pretty wild but that is not to be taken literally, it is to drive home a point, and so on. The Mishnah is a commentary on how to walk, and the Gemara (to learn) is a commentary on the Mishnah. Both together make the Talmud. All of this was not put together overnight, it took about 500 years but it does contain some useful insight into Jewish thought in the first century. Paul, Jude and the gospel writers all quote from things eventually found in Talmud. Now, as a believer in Yeshua it does not have the same authority as the Scripture, as some believe.

There is no such thing as an “Oral Torah” that G-d gave Moses on Mt. Sinai that carries the same weight as the written word. All that G-d gave to Moses was written down, there is nothing oral even hinted at. But, the Talmud can be a useful source for information and if you want more information on this subject, go to www.jewishencyclopedia.com. I hope this helps.