Q&A: Why the Talmud Was Edited in a Way That Isn’t Understandable Without Commentators
Why the Talmud Was Edited in a Way That Isn’t Understandable Without Commentators
Question
Hello,
Why didn’t Ravina and Rav Ashi edit the Talmud in such a way that it would be completely clear and understandable?
I’ve never seen anyone who understands the Talmud without any commentator at all, and that’s even before the issue that there are disputes among the commentators about how to understand the Talmud.
If, for example, someone were summarizing all of medicine, he would do the maximum to make everything completely clear. And likewise in any important field.
So why isn’t it like that in the Talmud?
Thank you
Answer
The question of the Talmud’s lack of clarity has several aspects, and you didn’t distinguish between them. Each one requires a separate discussion. I’ll answer briefly by way of four comments.
- You assume that Ravina and Rav Ashi edited the Talmud. That is by no means agreed upon, and probably not entirely correct. Simply speaking, what happened here was an ongoing editorial process by quite a number of editors, which ended long after Ravina and Rav Ashi.
- From this you can understand that this is not a completely harmonious text, and one should not expect it to look like a text by a single author. What we have here is a merging of topics and discussions from different periods and study halls, stitched together in various ways. If one does not want to tamper with the substance itself, something not very orderly or clear will necessarily result.
- When a text was written thousands of years before our time, there will always be misunderstandings, even without the previous considerations. For example, do you think a medical, scientific, or mathematical book from that period would be understandable to you? Obviously not.
- There is an associativeness to the text; it is not built as organized, classified information with bottom lines and a decision in every topic. It is not a code, and as a canon it is very strange and unique. There are very good reasons for this, and I wrote about them in column 482.
Discussion on Answer
First of all, you have no alternative source to learn from. This is what there is.
Beyond that, there are major advantages to this kind of editing (as I wrote in the above-mentioned column), and the only way to learn Talmudic thinking is from within the Talmudic mess. A systematic text would not have conveyed that to us.
Hello,
Thank you for the answer.
I still don’t understand how it’s possible to study something that may contain editorial problems, disorder, and the like. After all, for example, I wouldn’t go to a training course to become a fitness coach if I knew there were various problems in the course materials, because how would I know what is correct and what isn’t? Maybe critical things are missing or not explained well enough, maybe I’m understanding things incorrectly, and so on.