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To Dialogue With Eternity
| Article
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16910 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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4 / 1990 |
3,563 Words |
| Author
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Jacob Neusner
Jacob Neusner is University Professor at Brown University and
author of Death and Birth of Judaism and other books. |
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
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