Torah She'baal Peh — The Oral Torah
The Oral Torah is the living tradition of interpretation transmitted alongside the Written Torah — the tradition that enables each generation to hear the Torah's voice speaking to their own time.
Torah She'baal Peh (Oral Torah — literally 'Torah that is on the mouth') is the tradition of interpretation, application, and elaboration that was transmitted orally from Moses at Sinai through the generations of teachers. Jewish theology holds that both Written and Oral Torah were given at Sinai — the written text requiring the oral interpretation to be understood. When the Talmud records debates between Beit Shammai and Beit Hillel (the Schools of Shammai and Hillel), both positions are sometimes declared 'words of the living God' (Eruvin 13b) — a remarkable teaching that multiple conflicting interpretations can both be divinely true. The Oral Torah, compiled into the Mishnah (c. 200 CE by Rabbi Judah the Prince) and expanded into the Babylonian Talmud (c. 500 CE), represents approximately 1,500 years of continuous scholarly conversation — one of the most extraordinary intellectual achievements in human history.
Both these and these are words of the living God.
Philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer's hermeneutical theory — arguing that understanding always occurs within a tradition and that every interpretation is a dialogue between the text and its interpreter's historically situated horizon — describes precisely the process of Talmudic study that the Oral Torah tradition embodies.
Talmud Bavli