A page of Gemara is a record of argument rather than a statement of conclusions. The discussion, called the sugya, opens from a clause of the Mishnah and immediately begins to probe it. What is the source of this ruling in Scripture. Does it contradict another tannaitic tradition, one of the baraitot preserved outside the Mishnah. Whose opinion does the anonymous clause represent, and what would the dissenting sage say. The editors preserve the back and forth itself: an objection is raised, a resolution offered, the resolution attacked, a second resolution proposed, and sometimes the difficulty is simply allowed to stand with the word teyku, traditionally read as a promise that it will be resolved in the messianic future.
Legal reasoning is interleaved with aggadah, the non-legal material of stories, biblical interpretation, medicine, dream lore and ethics, so that a discussion of contract law can open into a tale about a sage and close with a homily. This dialectical texture made the Gemara not a code to be consulted but a discipline to be practised. Later codifiers such as Alfasi, Maimonides and Joseph Karo distilled rulings from it, yet the curriculum of the traditional academy has always been the argument itself, studied aloud and in pairs.