This volume - Zevahim, Menahot, Hullin - is the ninth in the series Sources and Traditions: Commentaries on the Talmud . Like its predecessors, it distinguishes between sources (the original sayings in the Talmud) and traditions (sayings that have been changed in the course of transmission).

This is the eighth book in the Sources and Traditions - Critical Commentary on the Talmud series.

The standard study of Talmud is to accept the given as ultimate, that the sayings and the interpretations recorded therein are faithful to what was actually said. After having checked for the genuine version, for the right GIRSAH, eliminating the scribal errors, the text assumes reliability and serves as a starting point for further discussions and additional deductions. For over forty years, Prof. David Halivni has questioned the given as the authoritative text and argued for the necessity to go back in time and reexamine the veracity of the interpretations. Many of the given interpretations are forced, do not neatly fit the text they interpret and often attribute to the authors of the statements intentions that they did not necessarily share. As a consequence, substitute interpretations were necessary to which the multi volumes of "Sources and Traditions" were dedicated. While the books dealt mainly with the actual Talmudic interpretations, the introductions dealt with the causes responsible for the deviations from the original. It took the writings of a few volumes to become clear that the interpretations, unlike the apodictic statements were not officially transmitted by the Transmitters, the professional reciters and reached the later compilers which are referred to in the volumes as STAMMAIM, anonymous scholars, only through random survival which was not always complete. Sometimes it survived in a truncated form which the later compilers filled in, conjecturing what was missing. The present volume contains all of the introductions which provide the reader not only with the final conclusion but also with the developmental stages which led to that conclusion further strengthening its plausibility.

This is the seventh in the Sources and Traditions - Critical Commentary on the Talmud series.

This volume may very well be the first systematic source critical commentary on the Babylonian Talmud, with the exception perhaps of the relatively small book , Darka shel Torah, by H. M. Pineles, whose agenda was more to defend the content of the Mishnah than to explore Talmudic thinking. Now, after the appearance of the eighth volume, it is even more apparent how comprehensive is the method laid out in the first volume, covering different topics and a variety of texts and how it eventually led to the theory of the Stammaim which, according to some revolutionized our understanding of the composition of the Babylonian Talmud. It is an indispensable introduction to an alternate way of studying Talmud.