THE TALMUD
The Steinsaltz Edition
Commentary by Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz
New York: Random House, 1989.
252 pp., $40
So much hype has accompanied the publication of the first volume of Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz's translation of one chapter of one tractate of the Babylonian Talmud that it is easy to wonder whether, withal this sizzle, they're selling any beef. They are - plenty of it. Steinsaltz's edition is a good and useful piece of work and, when brought to completion in forty volumes, will serve synagogue study groups, Yeshiva and Hebrew day school classes, and others interested in a serious encounter with Judaism. There is in English no better way of embarking on the study of the Babylonian Talmud in its own text and circumstance than Steinsaltz's.
From its completion around A.D. 600, the Talmud of Babylonia (Hebrew: Bavli) has formed the foundation of Judaism: It is the summa, the starting point, the final authority. It is made up of two parts. The first contains selections of a law code, the Mishnah, which comprises sixty-three tractates divided into six divisions: agriculture, festivals, women and family, the civil laws and code, laws governing the Temple cult and it maintenance, and uncleanness taboos, the last covering about a quarter of the whole document. The Talmud of Babylonia selects thirty-seven tractates in the second, third, fourth, and fifth divisions (whereas the Talmud of the Land of Israel, which closed ca. A.D. 400, treats thirty-nine tractates, from the first through the fourth divisions).
To the tractates chosen for amplification and clarification is added the second part of the document, a systematic and well-crafted commentary on and supplement to the Mishnah. This other half may be called the gemara, or simply, "the Talmud." In fact, when people speak of the Talmud, they generally refer not to be Mishnah with its commentary but to the re-presentation of small sense units of the Mishnah, whether sentences or paragraphs, in the setting of the on-going discourse of the commentary.
What has Steinsaltz done? In the English language he has, certainly, presented the Talmud of Babylonia in such a way that it can be studied line by line, pretty much as it is studied in the original Aramaic and Hebrew. To understand what this means, you have to know that the Talmud is not printed as a modern book is, with sentences formed into paragraphs, paragraphs into chapters, perhaps with some footnotes. Discursive reading is not the way the Talmud is studied. Specifically, a little bit of text is set in the middle of the page and surrounded by an array of various commentaries.
On the inside, nearest the binding, at the top, is the commentary of the master of all commentators, R. Isaac Solomon (Hebrew: Rashi), 1040-1105, and Alsatian genius who commented on the classics of Judaism, the Hebrew Scriptures and the Talmud of Babylonia, and who did so with such mastery of the received exegetical tradition and with such perspicacious clarity that, from then to this very day, he has been considered the most authoritative commentator on the basic books of Judaism.
Facing him, at the top, on the other side of the page, are
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