The body of the Jewish civil and canonical law not comprised in the Pentateuch.
Note: The Talmud consists of two parts, the Mishna, or text, and the Gemara, or commentary. Sometimes, however, the name Talmud is restricted, especially by Jewish writers, to the Gemara. There are two Talmuds, the Palestinian, commonly, but incorrectly, called the Talmud of Jerusalem, and the Babylonian Talmud. They contain the same Mishna, but different Gemaras. The Babylonian Talmud is about three times as large as the other, and is more highly esteemed by the Jews.
In a practical sense, there are other books beside the Old Testament which go to make up the Jewish Bible. The Talmud, or rather the two Talmuds; the Jerusalem Talmu (comprising the Mishna, or Second Law), compiled about 150 B.C. by a Jewish rabbi; and the Babylonian Talmud, compiled about six hundred and fifty years later,—are regarded by the Jews as equally inspired and equally binding in their moral requisitions as that of the Old Testament. In fact, they compare the former to wine, and the latter to water, when speaking of their relative value. Some "tall stories" are found in these Jewish revelations, such as these: it tells of a bird so tall that the water of a river in which it stood came only to its knees, though the water was so deep that it took an ax, thrown into it, seven years to reach the bottom; and of an egg of such enormous dimensions, that, when broken, the white of it glued a whole town together and a forest of three hundred cedar-trees. These are but specimens of their miracles. Such is the character of the Jewish sacred writings, emanating from the same source as the Old Testament; and consequently of equal authority and reliability, and equally entitled to our belief.
Kersey and Lydia Graves. The Bible of Bibles (1879)
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Uses:
Nothing would induce my parents to let me be educated, and they wanted me to take to trade, too, and to know nothing but the Talmud. . . . But you will agree, it is not everyone who can spend his whole life struggling for a crust of bread, wallowing in filth, and mumbling the Talmud.
Anton Chekhov. The Bishop and Other Stories
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Necessity is the mother of "taking chances." I do not doubt that if, at that time, I had been offered a salary to translate the Talmud from the original Hebrew, I would have accepted—albeit with diffidence and some misgivings—and thrown as much variety into it as I could for the money.
Mark Twain. Roughing It (1880)
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‘But it was written — in the Talmud — that you should involve yourself in the inscrutable and gloomy Fate which it is my mission to accomplish, and which wreathes itself — e’en now — about in temples. [...]'