Bavli | Talmud, Jewish Law & History (2024)

Bavli, second and more authoritative of the two Talmuds (the other Talmud being the Yerushalmi) produced by Rabbinic Judaism. Completed about 600 ce, the Bavli served as the constitution and bylaws of Rabbinic Judaism.

Several attributes of the Bavli distinguish it from the Talmud Yerushalmi (Palestinian Talmud) and must be considered in accounting for its great intellectual influence. First, the Bavli shows how practical reason can work to make diverse issues and actions conform to a single principle. Second, it shows how applied logic discerns the regular and the orderly in the confusion and disorder of everyday conflict.

The Bavli in its 37 tractates is entirely uniform, stylistic preferences exhibited on any given page characterize every other page of the document, and diverse topics produce only slight differentiation in modes of analysis. The task of interpretation in the Talmudic writing was to uncover the integrity of the truth that God manifested in the one and unique revelation, the Torah (both oral and written). By integrity was meant a truth that was unified and beyond all division. The message of the first document of the oral Torah, the Mishnah, was the hierarchical unity of all being in the One on high. Since the Bavli’s authorship undertook precisely the same inquiry, the way that the Mishnah and the Bavli deal with the problem of showing the integrity of truth illuminates for the reader how the two dominant documents of Judaism set matters forth.

The Mishnah’s version of the integrity of truth focuses upon the unity of all being within a hierarchy. The Mishnah’s overriding proposition is that all classes of things stand in a hierarchical relationship to one another, and, in that encompassing hierarchy, there is place for everything. The theological proposition that is implicit but never spelled out, of course, is that one God occupies the pinnacle of the hierarchy of all being—to that one God all things turn upward, from complexity to simplicity; from that one God all things flow downward, from singularity to multiplicity. To state with emphasis the one large argument—the metaproposition—that the Mishnah’s authorship sets forth in countless small ways: the very artifacts that appear multiple in fact form classes of things, and, moreover, these classes themselves are subject to a reasoned ordering by appeal to this-worldly characteristics signified by properties and indicative traits.

The Bavli’s version of the integrity of truth matches the Mishnah’s theme of the hierarchical unity of all being with the Bavli’s principle that many principles express a single one—many laws embody one governing law, which is the law behind the laws. However, the difference in the documents may be seen, in how, for instance, the Mishnah establishes a world in stasis: lists of like things, subject to like rules. In contrast, the Bavli portrays a world in motion: lists of like things form series, but series also conform to rules. The Bavli’s paramount intellectual trait is its quest through abstraction for the unity of the law and the integrity of truth. That same quest insists on the fair and balanced representation of conflicting principles behind discrete laws—not to serve the cause of academic harmony but to set forth how, at their foundations, the complicated and diverse laws may be explained by appeal to simple and few principles. The conflict of principles then is less consequential than the demonstration that diverse cases may be reduced to only a few principles.

Both Talmuds, the Yerushalmi and the Bavli, treat the same issues of the Mishnah, yet the second Talmud radically differs from the first, and the two Talmuds rarely intersect other than at a given Mishnah paragraph or Tosefta selection. This is not so surprising, for, despite the fact that the Yerushalmi is 200 years older than the Bavli, scholars do not believe the framers of the Bavli to have had access to the Yerushalmi during the Bavli’s redaction. (Though some sayings known to the editors of the Yerushalmi also circulated among those of the Bavli.) Therefore, each Talmud pursues its own interests when reading a passage shared with the other. No substantial, shared exegetical protocol or tradition, whether in fully spelled-out statements in so many words, or in the gist of ideas, or in topical conventions, or in intellectual characteristics, governed the two Talmuds’ reading of the same Mishnah paragraph. The Bavli presents an utterly autonomous statement, speaking in its own behalf and in its own way about its own interests.

If we compare the way in which the two Talmuds read the same Mishnah, we discern consistent differences between them. The principal difference between the Talmuds is the same difference that distinguishes jurisprudence from philosophy. The Yerushalmi talks in details, the Bavli in large truths; the Yerushalmi tells us what the Mishnah says, the Bavli, what it means. How do the two Talmuds compare502266

1. The Yerushalmi analyzes evidence, the Bavli investigates premises;

2. The Yerushalmi remains wholly within the limits of its case, the Bavli vastly transcends the bounds of the case altogether;

3. The Yerushalmi wants to know the rule, the Bavli asks about the principle and its implications for other cases.

The Yerushalmi provides an exegesis and amplification of the Mishnah; the Bavli, a theoretical study of the law in all its magnificent abstraction, transforming the Mishnah into testimony to a deeper reality altogether: to the law behind the laws.