Classical Rabbinic Literature

Classical Rabbinic Literature is the standard scholarly term for the body of commentary, legal reasoning and interpretive tradition produced by the rabbis of late antiquity and the early medieval period, distinct from the Hebrew Bible text it comments upon. Its core works include the Mishnah, the foundational early third-century CE codification of Jewish oral law compiled under Judah ha-Nasi; the Gemara, the extended rabbinic discussion and analysis of the Mishnah that, combined with it, forms the Talmud in both its Babylonian and Jerusalem versions; the Tosefta, a companion collection of supplementary legal traditions organized along the same structure as the Mishnah; Midrash, the broad genre of rabbinic biblical exegesis that expounds scripture through legal derivation and narrative elaboration; the Targums, Aramaic translations and paraphrases of biblical books produced for synagogue use; and Pirkei Avot, the Mishnah tractate of ethical maxims attributed to generations of rabbinic sages. Together these works form the literary record of how rabbinic Judaism read, applied and transmitted the Hebrew Bible after the destruction of the Second Temple, and Wikipedia's own Rabbinic literature article treats them as one connected corpus for exactly this reason.