The textual tradition of the Babylonian Talmud

In this article we address the complicated textual tradition of the Babylonian Talmud (BT), which was most likely redacted towards the middle of the 6th century CE. The BT is the most prominent representative of rabbinic Judaism, having become the dominant source of law and lore in the Jewish tradition throughout the generations. This article concentrates on theoretical issues relevant to the analysis of the textual tradition of the BT, addressing both the history of scholarship on textual criticism and the various types of textual variants we find in the Babylonian Talmud. In Part I of the article we examine types and categories of extant manuscripts in the BT and the relationship between provenance and affinity to the original text. In part II we address the issue of the Urtext vs. pluriformity and describe the split into manuscript branches and the history of stemmatic studies in the Babylonian Talmud. Findings show that there is a tendency for the extant manuscripts of the BT to divide into two, and no more than two, distinct branches. The third section of the article discusses methods for organizing textual variants in the BT and argues in favor of the synoptic edition as the best way to analyze variants.