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talmud geeking
But studying it -- on its terms, not to find out something specific -- can be amazingly cool, as I've said before.
Something did make me wonder today, though. (Note: you do not need to chase the following footnotes to understand the main part of this entry!) My rabbi and I are currently working through the beginning of Tractate Berachot, which begins with the question of how early one can say the evening Shema [2]. The mishna (earlier part of the Talmud) says "at the same time that kohanim who were tamei can eat t'rumah" [3]. Which happens to be "nightfall" [4], but it doesn't come out and say that.
Ok, so the gemara (commentary on the mishna) asks, "why didn't the mishna just say 'nightfall', instead of bringing t'rumah into it?". A good question, in my opinion. :-) Quite a bit of commentary then follows, rooted in the premise that "the mishna (or gemara, in some cases) must be trying to teach us something" (about t'rumah, in this case).
Um, must it? Must every comment be an effort to teach something? Are there really no asides, no oh-by-the-ways, no off-topic thoughts? I find that possibility astonishing.
The mishna was written down by someone who, basically, wrote down everything he had been taught -- I gather, in the order that he remembered it. Of course there are going to be digressions. The gemara seems to assume that every statement or answer that is not straightforward was deliberately round-about in order to make some other point. This seems odd to me; I know how people write, and how at least some people think, when they're doing data dumps. I don't understand why the gemara looks for motives. In some places the commentaries quibble over the order in which the mishna and gemara present topics, as if the order was completely planned. But I don't get the impression that it was.
Perhaps I'll ask my rabbi about this when we study on Monday.
A couple weeks ago, I wrote about a discussion in our Shabbat Torah-study group about ritual purity (being "tahor") and ritual impurity (being "tamei"). Someone present had said "we're all tamei now anyway". I disagreed, because going to the mikveh (and waiting until evening) causes one to go from being tamei to being tahor, so even though we don't have the temple and it thus doesn't matter, I asserted that we're not tamei if we don't want to be. Just dunk and wait. (The person who made the statement hasn't come back with evidence yet; I suspect he's forgotten about it.)
So, this afternoon as I was studying, I saw a discussion in the gemara that says there are four types of tamei people who have to bring a korban (a sacrifice, to the temple) in order to return to being tahor. Those types are: a zav, a zavah, a woman who has given birth, and a metzora. A metzora is someone afflicted with what is (incorrectly) translated as "leprosy" -- or at least I think so; metzora and tazria are kind of intertwined in that space, and I don't really grok the difference if there is one. I had to go to the dictionary for "zav" ("zavah" is just the feminine form), which sounded vaguely familiar, and it says "one who has gonorrhea", which does not sound at all familiar. So I'm not sure what that's about, but the point is that anyone who has given birth or who is afflicted with a relevant disease is tamei today, because there is no way to bring a korban. I stumbled upon this answer to my own challenge completely by accident.
Being tamei doesn't affect all of us, of course (hey, I'm clean by those standards), but I can see how this could have become over-simplified in casual conversation over time. Perhaps I will remember to follow this up next week at Torah study and see if that's what the person who said that actually meant.
[1] The Talmud consists of approximately 5000
large pages of very dense Hebrew, probably 25,000
pages or so in coherent translation. (This estimate
is based on limited sampling.)
[2] We are biblically obligated to recite the Shema twice a day, "when you lie down and when you rise up" (Deut. 6:7).
[3] Kohanim are priests. Tamei is usually translated "impure" or "unclean"; you can get into this state in a number of ways. Mostly, you get rid of it by dunking in the mikveh [5] and waiting until evening. T'rumah is the tithed food that is reserved for the kohanim (remember, they didn't get land so they're dependent on the other tribes). It has to be eaten in a state of ritual purity, and in Jerusalem (I think).
[4] "Nightfall" means when three medium-sized stars are visible (or would be if you didn't live in the freaking city with all its light pollution), same as the end of Shabbat.
[5] Mikveh: ritual bath. Most cities with significant Jewish populations have them, and it gets regular use among the more traditional Jews.
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I was under the impression (which may be wrong, and it is 1:40 am at the moment and I had no nap so what am I doing a wake but I might be hallucinating as well as omitting necessary punctuation marks) that the Mishna went through a period of time where it was orally transmitted before it was written down. So the order might make a difference. In general, it's pretty dense, so the digressions would be interesting. On the other hand, the Talmud also freaks out whenever any word is repeated in the mishnah, which leads to some interesting things, since you'd expect a fair bit of repetition in an oral tradition. (Example: I've been reading the Iliad for some light shabbat and evening reading, and there's a lot of phrases, like "their blood spilled on the ground", "Aias of the warcry", etc. which are repeated... another example of an orally transmitted document. Although the Iliad is poetry, and not sacred text...)
Something else interesting is that the Mishnah seems to have its own set of laws, while the Gemara tries really hard to link everything in the Mishnah to something in the Torah. This can lead to some interesting stuff. Combined with the belief that there's no repetition in the Torah, you can get some fun stuff. (For example, I remember vaguely hearing of this: in the torah, there are three times where it says that you should bury a body which is found between towns. The Talmud decides that the first time means what it says. The second time means that if you're a cohen then you should bury a body. (Cohanim usually aren't supposed to touch dead bodies because they then become tamei, and unable to do ritual stuff.) The third time means that if you're the cohen gadol on Yom Kippur you should bury such a body. (See previous comment and multiply by several orders of magnitude). Of course, the Hebrew text in the cases is practically identical... )
OK, I really must sleep now.
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Well, Avot 1:1 certainly seems to imply that the oral law (not further specified) was taught orally from generation to generation, starting at Sinai, so the form in which it reached Yehudah ha-Nasi, who wrote it down, was probably codified a fair bit. How that codification occurred is unknwon to me. I also do not know if the editors of the gemara reordered things in the mishna at all.
Repeated words: I agree that you would expect repetition and that sometimes our tradition takes interpretation based on repetition to extremes (like your Torah example).
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I don't know either, but I have a couple of ideas of how one could find out. Unfortunately, I have neither the time nor the knowledge to pursue these avenues.
First idea is to look for old manuscripts of the Mishnah alone; do any of these show differences from the Mishnah as recorded in the Babylonian Talmud? Secondly, cross-check the Mishah as recorded in the Palestinian Talmud with the Babylonian Talmud. (This would probably have to be done from older manuscripts as I would guess that more modern editions would helpfully have normalized the Palestinian Talmud to match the Babylonian). It's possible that someone's done one or both of these already. If nobody has, and someone wants to use this for their dissertation, I have no objections...
(If differences are found, one gets into a question of whether differences are due to scribal errors in copying the Mishnah text since the Gemara was written, or whether they were there before... I seem to remember that there are only a few manuscripts of the Palestinian Talmud, which would make the determination of scribal errors more difficult.)