Among the absurd notions as to what the Talmud was, given credence in the Middle Ages, one was that it was a man! The mediaeval priest or peasant was perhaps wiser than he knew. Almost, might we say, the Talmud was Man, for it is a record of the doings, the beliefs, the usages, the hopes, the sufferings, the patience, the humor, the mentality, and the morality of the Jewish people for half a millennium. What is the Talmud? There is more than one answer. Ostensibly it is the corpus juris of the Jews from about the first century before the Christian era to about the fourth after it. But we shall see as we proceed that the Talmud was much more than this… The very word “Law” in Hebrew-“Torah” – means more than its translation would imply. The Jew interpreted his whole religion in terms of law, It is his name in fact, for the Bible’s first five books the Pentateuch. To explain what the Talmud is we must first explain the theory of its growth, more remarkable perhaps than the work itself.
Download Hebraic Literature-The Talmud Midrashim and Kabbala-Translation-MH Harris-1936