Just in time for Passover, Sefaria has almost completed its vowelled edition of Babylonian Talmud, with complete English translation. Its vowelling is based on the famous Steinsaltz edition.
https://www.sefaria.org/texts/Talmud
Everything is done and posted except Menachot and Chullin, and those will probably be posted sometime between now and Shavuot, Z'man Matan Toratenu. Chazaq!
If you ever wanted to read Talmud, let me manage your expectations. You can't just run your eyes over the translation and profit from it, any more than you could run your eyes over Einstein's paper on special relativity and profit from it. You need to do a lot of advance preparation. With relativity, it's calculus and linear operators and the fundamentals of physics.
With Talmud, it's Mishnah. But even Mishnah you can't just run your eyes over, you have to study it carefully before you have half an idea of what the Gemara in Talmud is telling you.
And you won't understand Mishnah if you haven't studied Torah, or Gemara if you haven't studied the entire Tanakh. The whole Jewish Bible is background to understanding Talmud because Talmud refers to lots of places in Tanakh as examples of what the rabbis are thinking.
That's because everything in Prophets and Writings was preserved for their examples or evidence of what Torah meant. They were preserved because they agree with Torah. Don't let anybody cite that verse in Jeremiah to you; they will cite a translation and the translation is wrong.
And as I have said over and over on this thread and as I also said on my Fallacies thread, every translation is a strawman argument.
So you will not understand Tanakh if you don't know Biblical Hebrew, which I also have a thread on.
I had to go through Torah twenty times before I memorized all the catchphrases that Mishnah uses, showing that they are not just words, they are legal terminology.
I had to go through Mishnah ten times before I could appreciate the Gemara -- and Mishnaic Hebrew is different from Biblical Hebrew. And then there are other things.
For one, Mishnah and Talmud are organized associatively. My guru R. Bechhoffer literally said this in his recordings of lectures on Jerusalem Talmud. I have a post about it on this thread. It's one reason that just running your eyes over the translation won't help you understand Talmud. There are many digressions that come up due to an association of ideas, and when they are over the discussion will return to some earlier subject.
For another thing, Mishnah and Talmud -- and Tanakh itself -- are all about JUDAISM. They are records of its oral tradition from before 4000 BCE to about 600 CE when the last parts of Talmud were recorded in writing. Oral traditions by nature are associative, not linear by subject the way we write things nowadays. They also reflect their own culture; trying to understand them based on some other culture is disrespectful at best and won't get you anywhere because no two cultures have enough points of similarity to interpret one in terms of the other. The same is true for language, and you need to learn Biblical and Mishnaic Hebrew and Biblical and Talmudic Neo-Babylonian (once called Aramaic) or you will never get the full effect of the material.
And for a third thing, Mishnah and Talmud are legalistic material. Yes, they contain narratives and even poetry, and they refer to narratives and poetry in Tanakh. But every reference is related to Jewish law and if you know nothing about how any legal system works, you won't understand what Tanakh, Mishnah and Gemara are getting at. Also, you can't interpret Jewish law in terms of another legal system any more than you can get the most out of these works without understanding the language in which they were recorded.
The Sefaria edition of Talmud has careful citations to Tanakh and you can call up all the best commentaries from Jewish history; the most useful is probably Rashi, still the premiere explanation about what Tanakh and Talmud are getting at. (And a fellow language geek of mine.)
Yes. It's a lot of work. We all have limited time in our lives. The time I spent on Jewish studies got me two things. One is, I know when people are lying to me about what Jewish literature says.
The other is, I'm learning how close the Talmudic rabbis were to the lives of working people and to the ecology of their environment. They knew how to destroy an ant colony. They knew that peaches and almonds were closely related. They knew that a cow's spots resemble those of her parents, centuries before Gregor Mendel's genetic experiments. They knew that people came in at least four types of gender and covered all four in their discussions.
And they originally kept all this knowledge in their heads. It was prohibited to write Talmud down except as reminders. A messenger from one school to another could carry a note with a written version of a discussion, to get the opinions of people who weren't there at the time and might have something to contribute. What went into the ark of the covenant could have been just the Ten Commandments, or it could have been all 613 commandments, but it stayed in the ark; the people judging legal disputes had to do it from memory. The tradition recorded in Tanakh was passed along orally until the Babylonian Captivity. When Jews stopped talking Biblical Hebrew, they realized they were losing comprehension of the material on which their legal system relied. So they wrote Torah down first, no doubt, and then Prophets, and the Writings last, with some portions in Biblical Neo-Babylonian, their current street language.
And then they suffered persecution at the hands of Christians, forbidding them to use any scripture that wasn't in Greek or Latin. But the Hebrew version survived because Jews already lived outside the Roman Empire, or in places where the Romans would have to catch them first. And by the time the Theodosian Code came out, Theodosius had bigger problems than enforcing it, the Huns being just one example. A Papal bull intended to gut the Talmud was irrelevant almost as soon as it came out, thanks to his writ not running in Protestant countries -- and Jews already migrating to the Americas.
If you're a Jew, don't let ignoramuses lie you into ignoring your classic literature. Do the work. Feel the pride.
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