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Oral Law

noun

  1. Judaism the traditional body of religious law believed to have been revealed to Moses as an interpretation of the Torah and passed on orally until it was codified and recorded, principally in the Mishna and Gemara
“Collins English Dictionary — Complete & Unabridged” 2012 Digital Edition © William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1979, 1986 © HarperCollins Publishers 1998, 2000, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2012


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Example Sentences

That’s when she learned about mitzvot as a commandment — and, prodded by class conversations, began studying what the Torah and the Talmud, a book of Jewish oral law, said about abortion.

I read aloud a thought unit that consisted of a citation from the Mishnah—the Mishnah is the written text of rabbinic oral law; in form and content it is for the most part terse and clipped, a vast collection of laws upon which are based almost all the rabbinic discussions which, together with the Mishnah, compose the Talmud.

But when Joshua Foer, author of “Moonwalking With Einstein” and creator of the travel website Atlas Obscura, sat down one day to find a modern, complete English translation online of the Talmud, or Jewish Oral Law, he came up mostly empty, save for some pirated PDFs and a host of anti-Semitic sites.

The Talmud is a compilation of oral law and discussions by Jewish sages over generations.

He decided to use a piece of ancient oral law, which says if a person's head is severed from his body, he is dead, explaining to people that being brain dead was effectively equivalent to having been decapitated.

From BBC

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