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THE STRUCTURE AND SYSTEM OF BABYLONIAN TALMUD

BEKHOROT

Whether or not the Talmud of Babylonia is carefully organized in large-scale, recurrent structures and guided by a program that we may call systematic forms the principal question addressed by an academic commentary. The preceding chapters therefore have pointed toward the presentation set forth here. By "structure" I mean, a clearly articulated pattern that governs the location of fully-spelled out statements. By "system," I mean, a well-crafted and coherent set of ideas that explain the social order of the community addressed by the writers of a document, a social philosophy, a theory of the way of life, world view, and character of the social entity formed by a given social group. I see a collective, anonymous, and political document, such as the one before us, as a statement to, and about, the way in which people should organize their lives and govern their actions. At issue then in any document such as the remarkable one before us is simple: does this piece of writing present information or a program, facts to whom it may concern, or a philosophically and aesthetically cogent statement about how things should be?

The connection between structure and system is plain to see. From the way in which people consistently frame their thoughts, we move to the world that, in saying things one way rather than in some other, they wish to imagine the world in which they wish to live, to which they address these thoughts. For if the document exhibits structure and sets forth a system, then it is accessible to questions of rationality. We may ask about the statement that its framers or compilers wished to make by putting the document together as they did. But if we discern no structure and perceive no systematic inquiry or governing points of analysis, then all we find here is inert and miscellaneous information, facts but no propositions, arguments, viewpoints.

Now the Talmud commonly finds itself represented as lacking organization and exhibiting a certain episodic and notional character. That view moreover characterizes the reading and representation of the document by learned and experienced scholars, who have devoted their entire lives to Talmud study and exegesis. It must follow that upon the advocate of the contrary view - the one implicit in the representation of the document for academic analysis - rests the burden of proof. I set forth the allegation that the Talmud exhibits a structure and follows a system and therefore exhibits a commonly-intelligible rationality. The claim to write an academic commentary explicitly states that proposition. For the tractate before us, I have therefore to adduce evidence and argument.

I maintain that through the normal procedures of reasoned analysis we may discern in the tractate a well-crafted structure. I hold that the structure made manifest, we may further identify the purpose and perspective, the governing system of thought and argument, of those who collected and arranged the tractate's composites and put them together in the way in which we now have them. By "structure" I mean, how is a document organized? and by "system," what do the compilers of the document propose to accomplish in producing this complete, organized piece of writing? The answers to both questions derive from a simple outline of the tractate as a whole, underscoring the types of compositions and composites of which it is comprised. Such an outline tells us what is principal and what subordinate, and how each unit - composition formed into composites, composites formed into a complete statement - holds together and also fits with other units, fore and aft. The purpose of the outline then is to identify the character of each component of the whole, and to specify its purpose or statement. The former information permits us to describe the document's structure, the latter, its system.

While the idea of simply outlining a Talmud-tractate beginning to end may seem obvious, I have never made such an outline before, nor has anyone else. Yet, as we shall now see, the character of the outline dictates all further analytical initiatives. Specifically, when we follow the layout of the whole, we readily see the principles of organization that govern. These same guidelines on organizing discourse point also to the character of what is organized: complete units of thought, with a beginning, middle, and end, often made up of smaller, equally complete units of thought. The former we know as composites, the latter as compositions.

Identifying and classifying the components of the tractate - the composites, the compositions of which they are made up - we see clearly how the document coheres: the plan and program worked out from beginning to end. When we define that plan and program, we identify the facts of a pattern that permit us to say in a specific and concrete way precisely what the compilers of the tractate intended to accomplish. The structure realizes the system, the program of analysis and thought that takes the form of the presentation we have before us. From what people do, meaning, the way in which they formulate their ideas and organized them into cogent statements, we discern what they proposed to do, meaning, the intellectual goals that they set for themselves.

These goals - the received document they wished to examine, the questions that they brought to that document - realized in the layout and construction of their writing, dictate the points of uniformity and persistence that throughout come to the surface. How people lay out their ideas guides us into what they wished to find out and set forth in their writing, and that constitutes the system that defined the work they set out to accomplish. We move from how people speak to the system that the mode of discourse means to express, in the theory that modes of speech or writing convey modes of thought and inquiry.

We move from the act of thought and its written result backward to the theory of thinking, which is, by definition, an act of social consequence. We therefore turn to the matter of intention that provokes reflection and produces a system of inquiry. That statement does not mean to imply I begin with the premise of order, which sustains the thesis of a prior system that defines the order. To the contrary, the possibility of forming a coherent outline out of the data we have examined defines the first test of whether or not the document exhibits a structure and realizes a system. So everything depends upon the possibility of outlining the writing, from which all else flows. If we can see the order and demonstrate that the allegation of order rests on ample evidence, then we may proceed to describe the structure that gives expression to the order, and the system that the structure sustains.

The present work undertakes the exegesis of exegesis, for the Talmud of Babylonia, like its counterpart in the Land of Israel, is laid out as a commentary to the Mishnah. That obvious fact defined the character of my academic commentary, since we have already faced the reality that our Bavli-tractate is something other than a commentary, though it surely encompasses one. The problems that captured my attention derived from the deeper question of how people make connections and draw conclusions. To ask about how people make connections means that we identify a problem - otherwise we should not have to ask - and what precipitated the problem here has been how a composition or a composite fits into its context, when the context is defined by the tasks of Mishnah commentary, and the composition or composite clearly does not comment on the Mishnah-passage that is subjected to comment.