Reflecting on David’s puzzlement about the Jews and software meeting in Boston the other day, I recalled this Joel Spolsky essay on how reading code is like studying Talmud, in that it is best done in pairs, puzzling through and arguing about the meaning of the text.
When you think about it, the “link” form of the weblog has similarities to the classical Jewish form of text commentary. The blogger links to an article somewhere on the web, and then writes a commentary on the original text; then other commentators refer to the original commentator. In the traditional form, Jewish scholars wrote texts that commented on the bible or on the writings of earlier rabbis; and other rabbis wrote texts that commented on the earlier rabbis’ writings.
Because they didn’t have hypertext at the time, commentaries linked using chapter and sentence references; so when you study traditional texts, you wind up with a table full of books following the cross-references from book to book.
The form of the Talmud is similar to a recorded newsgroup or blog comments discussion. In the classical rabbinic academies, scholars discussed and debated a wide variety of topics, and those discussions were eventually edited into book form. The editors were concerned with representing the debate of ideas, not with historical accuracy — often, there are arguments between rabbis who didn’t live at the same time.
Its not that the Rabbis didn’t know how to write neat, logical, linear exposition. The classic rabbinic period was contemporaneous with the Hellenized civilization of the ancient world; they had the models of Greek thinking all around them, and they borrowed when it suited them — the Passover seder is modeled after the Platonic symposium. They looked at neat, logical, linear, hierarchical writing, decided that they didn’t like it, and wanted to write in weblog form instead.