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The Talmud, The Steinsaltz Edition, Vol. 1: Tractate Bava Metzia, Part 1
The The Steinsaltz Edition makes Judaism's great compendium of tradition, law, and legend readily accessible to the modern English reader for the first time.
Accepted as the authoritative basis for all codifications of Jewish law and subsequent codifications of Jewish law and practice, the multivolume Babylonian Talmud has been studied constantly by Jewish communities throughout the world since its completion in the sixth century.
Yet for most people, the complexity of the Talmud's Hebrew and Aramaic text is an almost impenetrable barrier to appreciating its riches. Even in translation, the unique system of logic and involved argumentation often baffle the inexperienced reader.
The The Steinsaltz Edition makes it possible for everyone to read the Talmud because it is more than just a translation. Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz becomes your personal instructor, guiding you through the intricate paths of Talmudic logic and thought. His extensive introductions and commentaries make the text crystal clear by providing all the background information needed to follow it, while his illustrated marginal notes supply fascinating insights into daily life in Talmudic times.
This volume, Tractate Bava Metzia, Part One, is one of the first sections traditionally studied by newcomers to the Talmud, since it contains so many or' the basic elements common to all Talmudic logic. It focuses on the resolution of disputes that may arise in daily life and commercial transactions, such as rival claims to the ownership of property.
Many related issues involving claims inevitably come under examination, such as contracts (including marriage contracts and bills of divorce), loans, promissory notes, and other such documents. There is much discussion of how the courts should proceed, including whether or not an oath, which is considered by the Talmud to be a matter of gave consequence, was to be administered to the various claimants.
The extraordinary sensitivity of the courts to ensuring absolute justice for all parties is reflected on every page. And as with all Talmudic discussions, the interplay of personalities and the subtleties of human relationships give rise to a host of possibilities that reflect human life as a whole.
Accepted as the authoritative basis for all codifications of Jewish law and subsequent codifications of Jewish law and practice, the multivolume Babylonian Talmud has been studied constantly by Jewish communities throughout the world since its completion in the sixth century.
Yet for most people, the complexity of the Talmud's Hebrew and Aramaic text is an almost impenetrable barrier to appreciating its riches. Even in translation, the unique system of logic and involved argumentation often baffle the inexperienced reader.
The The Steinsaltz Edition makes it possible for everyone to read the Talmud because it is more than just a translation. Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz becomes your personal instructor, guiding you through the intricate paths of Talmudic logic and thought. His extensive introductions and commentaries make the text crystal clear by providing all the background information needed to follow it, while his illustrated marginal notes supply fascinating insights into daily life in Talmudic times.
This volume, Tractate Bava Metzia, Part One, is one of the first sections traditionally studied by newcomers to the Talmud, since it contains so many or' the basic elements common to all Talmudic logic. It focuses on the resolution of disputes that may arise in daily life and commercial transactions, such as rival claims to the ownership of property.
Many related issues involving claims inevitably come under examination, such as contracts (including marriage contracts and bills of divorce), loans, promissory notes, and other such documents. There is much discussion of how the courts should proceed, including whether or not an oath, which is considered by the Talmud to be a matter of gave consequence, was to be administered to the various claimants.
The extraordinary sensitivity of the courts to ensuring absolute justice for all parties is reflected on every page. And as with all Talmudic discussions, the interplay of personalities and the subtleties of human relationships give rise to a host of possibilities that reflect human life as a whole.
- GenresReligion
266 pages, Hardcover
First published December 2, 1989
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
September 14, 2008
The entire Steinsaltz edition breaks ground in making the Talmud accessible to the non-yeshiva world without any watering down.
May 8, 2017
On one hand, this raises some interesting thought experiments. On the other...it's about as dry as you'd expect from a law textbook in some spots. It builds slowly, but like a lego instruction manual if you skip ahead even a single page you can easily become lost in the details. It's a difficult thing to get through.
It would probably be more handy if I had the ability to *type* easier in hebrew. More than a couple of the terms defined in this book I'd love to feed into my mnemosyne deck for later remembrance. For example their equivalent of "type" has some interesting connotations.
The talmud gives a sense that some things that they take for granted are old. The institution of slavery(like Islam, judaism is OK with resigning to participating in a system of slavery, and enforcing the slavery relationship when it suited them), property (the Talmud was for sure not the first attempt at formalizing what exactly it meant to own given how simple the concepts had already gotten by the time it came around), contracts, the idea of someone being "known as a liar", legalese(ie aramaric legalese), the double spending problem, rights. It might be worth going back to the Old Testament and creating a graph of these sorts of concepts that are used, implicitly, but which must have been invented at some point before the OT was written.
The talmud thus offers a kind of theory of money. Contrary to MMT, it's not the state but symbolic thinking that creates money. With their prohibition on usury, there is every attempt to not have real money but even given their restrictions you can see that if they were not enforced, you could see a dynamic system of wealth and power allocation developing.
Current projects like the W3C's Verifiable Claims Task Force might do well to look to see exactly how far the Talmud got, because much of the hard lifting is done on questions like 'what exactly is a claim' in a real social context. How can social differences be resolved? How can peace be obtained when what is contentious is up for argument? These are the things that you can find really old ruts of thought through that are well trodden in the years since this book was penned.
It would probably be more handy if I had the ability to *type* easier in hebrew. More than a couple of the terms defined in this book I'd love to feed into my mnemosyne deck for later remembrance. For example their equivalent of "type" has some interesting connotations.
The talmud gives a sense that some things that they take for granted are old. The institution of slavery(like Islam, judaism is OK with resigning to participating in a system of slavery, and enforcing the slavery relationship when it suited them), property (the Talmud was for sure not the first attempt at formalizing what exactly it meant to own given how simple the concepts had already gotten by the time it came around), contracts, the idea of someone being "known as a liar", legalese(ie aramaric legalese), the double spending problem, rights. It might be worth going back to the Old Testament and creating a graph of these sorts of concepts that are used, implicitly, but which must have been invented at some point before the OT was written.
The talmud thus offers a kind of theory of money. Contrary to MMT, it's not the state but symbolic thinking that creates money. With their prohibition on usury, there is every attempt to not have real money but even given their restrictions you can see that if they were not enforced, you could see a dynamic system of wealth and power allocation developing.
Current projects like the W3C's Verifiable Claims Task Force might do well to look to see exactly how far the Talmud got, because much of the hard lifting is done on questions like 'what exactly is a claim' in a real social context. How can social differences be resolved? How can peace be obtained when what is contentious is up for argument? These are the things that you can find really old ruts of thought through that are well trodden in the years since this book was penned.
April 19, 2007
i have read parts of many of the volumes in this series. its fabulous. if i were to suddenly become wildly wealthy this would go on my new bookshelves.
January 31, 2008
I am actually learning another tractate called pesachim but I could not find an english edition.
I am learning taking multiple perspective, asking questions, how behavior shape culture....
I am learning taking multiple perspective, asking questions, how behavior shape culture....
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews