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
Talmud called (), a Hebrew abbreviation of "", or the "six orders" of the Mishnah. The Talmud has two components; the Mishnah (Hebrew: משנה, year 200 CE), a written compendium of Rabbinic Judaism's Oral Torah; and the Gemara (circa year 500 CE), an elucidation of the Mishnah and related Tannaitic writings that often ventures onto other subjects and expounds broadly on the Hebrew Bible. The term "Talmud" may refer to either the Gemara alone, or the Mishnah and Gemara together. The entire Talmud consists of 63 tractates, and in standard print is over 6,200 pages long. It is written in Mishnaic