Babylonian Talmud).
V and VI (430-500) Babylonia--Rabina (completion of the
Babylonian Talmud).


The _Talmud_, or _Gemara_ ("Doctrine," or "Completion"), was a natural
development of the Mishnah. The Talmud contains, indeed, many elements
as old as the Mishnah, some even older. But, considered as a whole, the
Talmud is a commentary on the work of the Tannaim. It is written, not in
Hebrew, as the Mishnah is, but in a popular Aramaic. There are two
distinct works to which the title Talmud is applied; the one is the
Jerusalem Talmud (completed about the year 370 C.E.), the other the
Babylonian (completed a century later). At first, as we have seen, the
Rabbinical schools were founded on Jewish soil. But Palestine did not
continue to offer a friendly welcome. Under the more tolerant rulers of
Babylonia or Persia, Jewish learning found a refuge from the harshness
experienced under those of the Holy Land. The Babylonian Jewish schools
in Nehardea, Sura, and Pumbeditha rapidly surpassed the Palestinian in
reputation, and in the year 350 C.E., owing to natural decay, the
Palestinian schools closed.

The Talmud is accordingly not one work, but two, the one the literary
product of the Palestinian, the other, of the Babylonian _Amoraim_. The
latter is the larger, the more studied, the better preserved, and to it
attention will here be mainly confined. The Talmud is not a book, it is
a literature. It contains a legal code, a system of ethics, a body of
ritual customs, poetical passages, prayers, histories, facts of science
and medicine, and fancies of folk-lore.

The Amoraim were what their name implies, "Expounders," or