The
Talmud is the Mishnah and the Gemara. Gemara means Completion. The
Gemara is the completion of the Mishnah. The Mishnah is written with an
extreme brevity of language; its statements are highly-terse and
compact, requiring it to be unpacked and expanded in order to fully
understand.
The Sages of the Mishnah began their tradition long
before the writing the the Talmud as we know it today (these sages are
referred to as "Tanna'im"), which consists of the redaction of the
Mishnah and the much lengthier Gemara, which comprises the overwhelming
bulk of the text of the Talmud.
The Gemara is the accumulated
documentation of a period of intense Torah scholarship that lasted for
well over 300 years. The scholars whose debates and inquiries are
recorded in the Gemara are known as the "Amora'im".
There are in fact two Talmuds: Talmud Yerushalmi and Talmud Bavli.
The Talmud Yerushalmi was begun slightly earlier than the Bavli. The
Yerushalmi was written in Eretz Yisrael while the Bavli was written in
Babylonia.
Talmud Yerushalmi contains a Gemara for every Tractate
until the end of the Fourth Order of the Mishnah. The Sages of Yisrael
were unable to complete the redaction of the Gemara for all Six Orders
of the Mishnah. Talmud Bavli contains a Gemara for almost ever
y Tractate for the Second through the Fifth Order of the Mishnah.
So for neither the Yerushalmi or the Bavli were the Sages able to finish
the Gemara. The major missing component of both Talmuds is therefore
the Sixth Order of the Mishnah, the Order of Purities.
The result
of this analysis proves that the Sixth Order of the Mishnah remains the
most elusive and difficult to understand of all the Orders of the
Mishnah.
