Talmud and Rabbinic Text Quiz Prep

Aggadah

A second type of writings in the Talmud is called the Aggadah (also spelled Haggadah). Aggadah are not considered law (halakha) but literature that consists of wisdom and teachings, stories, and parables. The Aggadah are sometimes used with halakha to teach a principle or make a legal point.

Shema

Shema Yisrael (or Sh'ma Yisrael; Hebrew: שְׁמַע יִשְׂרָאֵל; "Hear, [O] Israel") are the first two words of a section of the Torah, and is the title (sometimes shortened to simply Shema) of a prayer that serves as a centerpiece of the morning and evening Jewish prayer services.

Talmud

the body of Jewish civil and ceremonial law and legend comprising the "Mishnah and the Gemara." There are two versions of the Talmud: the Babylonian Talmud (which dates from the 5th century AD but includes earlier material) and the earlier Palestinian or Jerusalem Talmud. The Talmud has two components: the Mishnah (Hebrew: משנה, c. 200 CE), a written compendium of Rabbinic Judaism's Oral Torah, and the Gemara ( c. 500 CE), an elucidation of the Mishnah and related Tannaitic writings that often ventures onto other subjects and expounds broadly on the Hebrew Bible.

Baraitot

Baraita (Aramaic: ברייתא "external" or "outside"; pl. Barayata or Baraitot; also Baraitha, Beraita; Ashkenazi: Beraisa) designates a tradition in the Jewish oral law not incorporated in the Mishnah. "Baraita" thus refers to teachings "outside" of the six orders of the Mishnah.unpublished?

Midrash

The Mishnah is the oral law in Judaism, as opposed to the written Torah, or the Mosaic Law. The Mishnah was collected and committed to writing about AD 200 and forms part of the Talmud. A particular teaching within the Mishnah is called a midrash. In Judaism, the Midrash (/ˈmɪdrɑːʃ/;[1] Hebrew: מדרש ; pl. מדרשים Midrashim) is a term given to a genre of rabbinic literature which contains anthologies and compilations of homilies, including both the exegesis of Torah texts and homiletic stories and sermons as well as aggadot and occasionally even halakhot, which usually form a running commentary on specific passages in the Tanakh.[2] The purpose of midrash was to resolve problems in the interpretation of difficult passages of the text of the Hebrew Bible, using Rabbinic principles of hermeneutics and philology to align them with the religious and ethical values of religious teachers. Midrash halakhah

Tosefta

The Tosefta (Talmudic Aramaic: תוספתא, "supplement, addition") is a compilation of the Jewish oral law from the late 2nd century, the period of the Mishnah.

The Mishnah (משנה, "repetition") essentially records the debates of the post-temple sages from AD 70—200 (called the Tannaim) and is considered the first major work of "Rabbinical Judaism." It is composed of six orders (sedarim), arranged topically:

Zeraim ("seeds") - discussions concerning prayer, diet, and agricultural laws • Moed ("festival") - discussions about holidays • Nashim ("women") - discussions about women and family life • Nezikin ("damages") - discussions about damages and compensation in civil law • Kodashim ("holy things") - discussions regarding sacrifices, offerings, dedications, and other temple-related matters • Tohorot ("purities") - discussions regarding the purity of vessels, foods, dwellings, and people

Gemara

a rabbinical commentary on the Mishnah, forming the second part of the Talmud. After the Mishnah was published by Judah HaNasi (c. 200 CE), the work was studied exhaustively by generation after generation of rabbis in Babylonia and the Land of Israel. Their discussions were written down in a series of books that became the Gemara, which when combined with the Mishnah constituted the Talmud.

Mishnah

an authoritative collection of exegetical material embodying the oral tradition of Jewish law and forming the first part of the Talmud. The Mishnah consists of six orders (sedarim, singular seder סדר), each containing 7-12 tractates (masechtot, singular masechet מסכת; lit. "web"), 63 in total, and further subdivided into chapters and paragraphs or verses. The word Mishnah can also indicate a single paragraph or a verse of the work itself, i.e. the smallest unit of structure in the Mishnah. For this reason the whole work is sometimes called by the plural, Mishnayot.