The Greatest Bible Study You've Never Heard Of

Imagine the scenario with me for a moment.  Your friend invites you to a Bible study, which fills you with the typical anxieties attending such an invitation.  Let’s be honest.  We’ve all been there.

“I dunno.  I’m pretty busy with other commitments,” you might say in deflection.  But you are curious.
“What are they studying?”

“Well… they study… everything!” your friend responds.  “I mean, their focus is limited to the Old Testament, but there’s not a single part of it that might not come up from one session to another.”

“That sounds kinda haphazard,” you retort.  That obligatory feeling is beginning to fade already.
“If you never know what they’re going to study, how does anyone ever prepare?”

“That’s the thing,” your friend beams.  “Everyone knows what they’re discussing from day to day, but they all know their Bible so well, that you can never anticipate where the conversation is going to turn!”

“What do you mean ‘from day to day?!’” you ask, incredulous.  That dim sensation of guilt is returning.

“Oh, yeah!  They meet every day.  And I mean every day.  On top of that, there are never any fewer than ten people at every gathering.  I have never seen anything like it in my entire life.”

Your friend’s enthusiasm strains credulity.  A Bible study that routinely has ten attendees that meets every day of the week all year long?!  Now you want to call into question a swift designation for a certain bovine scatological substance that is generally unutterable in Christian circles.

“You can’t be serious…”  Your words are filtered; your face is uncensored.

“My friend, I most certainly am.  I didn’t believe it myself, to be quite honest with you.  But I have been with them for a few weeks, and they never lag.  Seriously, their entire lives are devoted to keeping this schedule with each other.”

In spite of your doubts, this group of people is beginning to sound like the sort of community you have been imagining your entire Christian life.  But as most of us have done, you have come to believe that such an assembly simply cannot exist in the modern age.  We are too far removed from “those days.”

Still struggling to put the pieces together, you fish for more data.
“How long have they been gathering..?”

“Centuries,” your friend replies flatly.

“Centuries!?!” you exclaim.  “Who are these people?!”  Your mind races through Church History.

“I know!” your friend acknowledges.  “And get this!  Anybody is welcome to attend, but if you want to participate in the study, you have to memorize the entire Bible… I’m not even kidding… they have had their Bible memorized since they were children!  Not only that, but several of the men and women also have entire commentaries on the Scriptures committed to memory.  When they converse about any text, among the whole group, they have the entirety of the Old Testament in view every single moment.  Nobody pulls out their phones to look up a text – ever.  Sometimes one word in a single verse makes everyone remember a dozen other passages with that exact same word.  And then they try to figure out what they all mean together, scattered across all of the revelations from Moses to Malachi.  It is a wonder to behold.”

This is too much to take in at one hearing.  A Bible study that has been meeting daily, for centuries, with a core group that has the Bible – and then some – memorized.  How have you never heard of this before?

“All right, stop it!  Hold on a second…  Who are these people?”

Your friend pauses thoughtfully for a moment.  They take a breath, look you straight in the eye, and say,
“So, here’s the thing… They’re Jews.”

And with that, we have just begun to enter the context of the culmination of Jewish literature.
The Talmud is the collection of some 800 years of intense study and dialogue by the Jewish Sages, beginning approximately 400 years prior to the birth of Jesus and coming to a formal conclusion about 400 years after His birth.  Other commentators of the Middle Ages have been appended since then, most notably the Torah savant Rashi.

Now that we’ve entertained this fanciful dialogue, in our next installment we’ll address the Talmud more directly as a body of works well worth studying.