All these traditions Rabbi Judah the Holy undertook to reduce into one digest. And this laborious work he completed about A.D. 190, or more than a century after the destruction of Jerusalem by Titus. Rabbi Judah was born on the day that Rabbi Akibah died. Solomon is said to have foretold the event: “One sun ariseth, and one sun goeth down.” Akibah was the setting and Judah the rising sun. The Mishna of Rabbi Judah, afterward revised by Abba Areka in Sura, is the text of the Babylon Talmud. The commentaries written on this text by various Rabbis in the neighborhood of Babylon, until the close of the fifth century, are called the Gemara (completion), and are published in twelve folio volumes, called the Babylon Talmud—the Talmud most esteemed by the Jews. The Jerusalem Talmud contains commentaries written partly by Rabbis in Jamnia and partly in Tiberias, where they were completed by Rabbi Jochanan in the beginning of the fourth century. As now published it has only four out of the six orders or books of the Mishna, with the treatise Niddah from the sixth. In the time of Maimonides it contained five orders. On twenty-six treatises it has no Gemara, though in the treatise on shekels the Gemara of Jerusalem is used for the Babylon Talmud. The six books of the Mishna are subdivided into sixty-three treatises, in the following manner:
This book, called Order of Seeds, contains the following treatises:
1. “Blessings,” together with prayers and thanksgivings, with the times and places in which they are to be used.
2. “A Corner of a Field” (Lev. xxiii. 22; Deut. xxiv. 19) treats of the corners of the field to be left for the poor to glean them—the forgotten sheaves, olives, and grapes—and of giving alms, etc.
3. “Doubtful” treats of the doubt about the tithes being paid, as the Jews were not allowed to use anything without its being first tithed.
4. “Diversities” (Lev. xix. 19; Deut. xxii. 9-11) treats of the unlawful mixing or joining together things of a different nature or kind—of sowing seeds of a different species in one bed—grafting a scion on a stock of a different kind, suffering cattle of different kinds to come together.
5. “The Sabbatical Year” (Exod. xxiii. 11; Lev. xxv. 4) treats of the laws which regulated the land as it lay fallow and rested.