This book is an attempt to uncover the basic form and structure of the Babylonian Talmud. While a number of modern scholars have called attention to the fairly obvious fact that its final editors have used earlier material for their construction, little note has been taken of the way in which this material has been reworked so as to make each sugya a carefully structured unit, much as, say, Shakespeare's plays have converted the chronicles he used into a totally different and far more dramatic literary form.

Chapters 1 and 2 discuss the general nature of the Babylonian Talmud, pointing to the pseudepigraphic and purely academic form of a good deal of the material. Chapter 3, on Rabbinic views regarding the order and authorship of the Biblical books, has its place here both because of the light it sheds on the structure of a sugya and because it provides some indication of how the Rabbis thought literary units were compiled in ancient times. Chapters 4 through to 8 attempt an analysis of particular sugyot on the lines I have tried in my books, Studies in Talmudic Logic and Methodology (London, 1961) and The Talmudic Argument (Cambridge, 1984). Chapters 9 and 10 compare the treatment of particular narratives in the Babylonian and Jerusalem Talmuds, from which the tendency of the Babylonian Talmud to shape its material in a more dramatic form than the Jerusalem Talmud becomes clear.