What is the purpose, content and origin of the Talmud.
G-d gave an instruction manual for life called the Torah to the Jewish people. The Five books of Moses contain the basic outline of what we have to do but they leave a tremendous amount to be explained. The Torah says “Don’t Kill”. How about abortion? Euthanasia? Let’s say someone is threatening to kill me? No explanations. So He also gave us oral explanations to each passage in the Torah. They were passed down orally from generation to generation until about 2000 years ago when the Mishna and then the Talmud were written down to explain the Torah and present the basic outlines of the oral transmission. The Talmud contains these explanations as well as Rabbinic decrees, ethics, health guidelines, philosophy, even humor. The Babylonian Talmud was written by Rav Ashi in Iraq in the fifth or sixth century.
Rabbi Meir Goldberg