Judaism Early Jewish Thought -- Term Paper

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In the centuries just before and after the turn of the common era, the Jewish people pored over their sacred texts with a single-minded intensity, seeking in them not only a history of their ancestors and the glories of days gone by bur a corpus of divine instructions, a guide to proper conduct." (Kugel & Greer, 13)

The earliest form of discussion of such regulations is now known as the Midrash based on a Hebrew word meaning 'interpretation' or 'exegesis'.

In its evolution, Midrash minimized the authority of the wording of the text as communication, normal language. It placed the focus on the spiritual authority reader and the personal struggle of the reading interpreter to reach, with the reader's own mind, how to apply the text in an acceptable moral fashion, hence the importance of the sage to provide such guidance.

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The Talmud is an edited and compiled version of Mishna, or the writings of the learned rabbis on everything from how to observe the Sabbath to legal disputes. The term 'Gemara', another word for the Talmud, means addition, or an additional reading aid to the original Torah and collection of the Mishna. The Gemara or Talmud is thus an additional aid for Jews to understanding the writings upon the Torah known as the Mishna. Interestingly, although there is only one Mishna, there are two Gemaras, each developed by many rabbis over a few centuries, the Babylonian and the Palestine. Thus the holy sage was not only simply a learned figure, but also a controversial figure, as many interpretations of a single narrative passage were possible.

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