The Babylonian Talmud consists almost entirely of arguments having as their aim the elucidation of the law, ruling, religious teaching or ethical idea. Theories are advanced and then contradicted. They are examined from many points of view and qualified where necessary. One argument leads to another when logic demands it. The claims of conflicting theories are investigated with great thoroughness and much subtlety. Fine distinctions abound between apparently similar concepts. The whole constitutes reasoning processes which have received the most careful study on the part of generations of Jewish scholars and have contributed more to the shaping of the Jewish mind than any other factor.

No serious student of the Babylonian Talmud can be unaware that, for all the variety of topics discussed in the work, there is a formal pattern to the argumentation. Whatever the subject matter, the moves open to the debaters are comparatively few in number and these are always expressed in the same stereotyped formulae. There is much originality in Talmudic argumentation but this consists in the application to new situations of conventional responses, not in the invention of new responses. The game is always played according to the rules.

These formal methods of argumentation occur with the utmost frequency in the Babylonian Talmud yet, although there is to be observed a complete consistency in their use, nowhere in the Talmud itself is any attempt made at their enumeration and classification. Part of this task was left to the famous post-Talmudic methodologies, largely concerned with the classification of Talmudic method. However, in the main, the Talmudic methodologies deal with the precise definition of the terms used rather than with the actual types of argument.