The Jewish Writings

Tanakh is an acronym built from the Hebrew names of its three divisions: Torah (teaching, the five books of Moses), Nevi’im (Prophets), and Ketuvim (Writings). The Protestant Old Testament and the Jewish Tanakh contain the same books, counted and arranged differently. Where a Protestant Bible runs Genesis through Malachi and treats history, poetry, and prophecy as separate blocks, the Tanakh closes with Chronicles in the Writings, not with a prophet, and reads its own order as building toward the Writings rather than toward the prophets.

Torah is the five books of Moses. Nevi’im splits into the Former Prophets (Joshua through Kings, read as history written with a prophetic purpose) and the Latter Prophets (Isaiah through the twelve minor prophets). Ketuvim gathers everything else: Psalms, Proverbs, Job, the five scrolls (Song of Songs, Ruth, Lamentations, Ecclesiastes, Esther), Daniel, Ezra-Nehemiah, and Chronicles.

A Talmud is the Mishnah plus centuries of rabbinic discussion and argument about it, called the Gemara (Aramaic for completion). Two communities produced two separate Gemaras on the Mishnah, and so there are two Talmuds.

The Jerusalem Talmud (Talmud Yerushalmi) was compiled by rabbis in the land of Israel, finished around 400 AD, under increasing Roman and Byzantine pressure that cut the work short. The Babylonian Talmud (Talmud Bavli) was compiled by the larger, more stable rabbinic academies in Babylonia, finished around 500 to 600 AD. The Bavli is longer, more thoroughly edited, and became the authoritative Talmud for nearly all of later Jewish law and study. When this site cites “the Talmud” without further specification, it means the Bavli, matching standard practice, and any citation names the tractate and page (for example, Sanhedrin 98b).

A midrash is a piece of rabbinic interpretation that goes beyond the plain sense of a biblical text: filling a narrative gap the text leaves open, drawing a moral or legal lesson from a word choice or an apparent redundancy, or connecting two passages that share a word or theme. Midrash exists both as a method (something a rabbi does to a verse) and as a body of literature (collections like Genesis Rabbah or Ruth Rabbah, gathered and edited across roughly the third to twelfth centuries AD, the range spanning early classical midrashim through later medieval collections).

Midrash can be halakhic (drawing legal rulings from the text) or aggadic (drawing narrative and moral material), and most of the midrash this site cites is aggadic: a reading that adds color, a plausible historical detail, or a theological observation, never presented as the plain sense of the verse itself.