Talmud Hebrew and Jewish Babylonian Aramaic and contains the teachings and opinions of thousands of rabbis (dating from before the Common Era through to the fifth century) on a variety of subjects, including "halakha", Jewish ethics, philosophy, customs, history, lore and many other topics. The Talmud is the basis for all codes of Jewish law, and is widely quoted in rabbinic literature. Talmud translates as "instruction, learning", from a root " "teach, study". Originally, Jewish scholarship was oral. Rabbis expounded and debated the Torah (the written Torah expressed in the Hebrew Bible) and discussed the Tanakh without the benefit of written
Yemenite Hebrew well as the "ḥaṭaf sǝġūl", are all actually one and the same vowel (in the Babylonian tradition), and it is as though he had written two "shǝwa"s one after the other. Likewise, in the possessive case, “belonging to her companion” ⇒ שֶׁלַּחֲבִרְתָּהּ, the "lamed" in the preposition של is written with the vowel "pataḥ". The Leiden MS. of the Jerusalem Talmud is important in that it preserves some earlier variants to textual readings of that Talmud, such as in Tractate "Pesaḥim" 10:3 (70a), which brings down the old Palestinian-Hebrew word for "charoseth" (the sweet relish eaten at Passover), viz. "dūkeh"