The Talmud owed much to many minds.  Externally it was influenced by the nations with which the Jews came into contact.  From the inside, the influences at work were equally various.  Jochanan, Rab, and Samuel in the third century prepared the material out of which the Talmud was finally built.  The actual building was done by scholars in the fourth century.  Rabba, the son of Nachmani (270-330), Abayi (280-338), and Rava (299-352) gave the finishing touches to the method of the Talmud.  Rabba was a man of the people; he was a clear thinker, and loved to attract all comers by an apt anecdote.  Rava had a superior sense of his own dignity, and rather neglected the needs of the ordinary man of his day.  Abayi was more of the type of the average Rabbi, acute, genial, self-denying.  Under the impulse of men of the most various gifts of mind and heart, the Talmud was gradually constructed, but two names are prominently associated with its actual compilation.  These were Ashi (352-427) and Rabina (died 499).  Ashi combined massive learning with keen logical ingenuity.  He needed both for the task to which he devoted half a century of his life.  He possessed a vast memory, in which the accumulated tradition of six centuries was stored, and he was gifted with the mental orderliness which empowered him to deal with this bewildering mass of materials.

It is hardly possible that after the compilation of the Talmud it remained an oral book, though it must be remembered that memory played a much greater part in earlier centuries than it does now.  At all events, Ashi, and after him Rabina, performed the great work of systematizing the Rabbinical literature at a turning-point in the world’s history.  The Mishnah had been begun at a moment when the Roman empire was at its greatest vigor and glory; the Talmud was completed at the time when the Roman empire was in its decay.  That the Jews were saved from similar disintegration, was due very largely to the Talmud.  The Talmud is thus one of the great books of the world.  Despite its faults, its excessive casuistry, its lack of style and form, its stupendous mass of detailed laws and restrictions, it is nevertheless a great book in and for itself.  It is impossible to consider it further here in its religious aspects.  But something must be said in the next chapter of that side of the Rabbinical literature known as the Midrash.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

THE TALMUD.

Essays by E. Deutsch and A. Darmesteter (Jewish Publication Society
  of America).

Graetz.—­II, 18-22 (character of the Talmud, end of ch. 22).

Karpeles.—­Jewish Literature and other Essays, p. 52.

Steinschneider.—­Jewish Literature, p. 20.

Schiller-Szinessy.—­Encycl.  Brit., Vol.  XXIII, p. 35.

M. Mielziner.—­Introduction to the Talmud (Cincinnati, 1894).

S. Schechter.—­Some Aspects of Rabbinic Theology, J.Q.R., VI,
  p. 405, etc.