Building on the Structure of the Mishnah: The Solution of the Talmuds

The character and uses of the Mishnah made necessary the formation of the Talmuds, its constant exegetical companions. For with the processes of exegesis and application of the Mishnah came the labor of collecting and arranging these exegeses, in correlation with the Mishnah, read line by line and paragraph by paragraph. The result was the formation of adhoc and episodic amplifications and clarifications, which ultimately comprised the first stratum of the two Talmuds. The process, once applied to the Mishnah, overspread the limits of that document. Within the work of exegesis of Scripture was the correlative labor of organizing what had been said verse by verse, following the structure of a book of the Hebrew Bible. The sorts of things the sages who framed the Talmuds did to the Mishnah, they then went and did to Scripture. Just as the Mishnah was subjected to an exegesis consisting of citation and gloss, so Scripture was addressed in the same way by sages of the same circles. But the Mishnah framed the focus of initial interest and its requirements then dictated what would be done with Scripture. The documents all focus attention on the Mishnah in particular. Three of them, the Tosefta and the two Talmuds, the Talmud of the Land of Israel, a.k.a. the Yerushalmi, ca. A.D. 400, and the Talmud of Babylonia, a.k.a. the Bavli, ca. A.D. 600, organize everything at hand around the redactional structure supplied by the Mishnah itself.