Sharon Wynd: The Talmud: Color Coded, Numbered, Its Layout Revealed

During the early years of the twentieth century many philosophers were engaged in a long quest for the meaning of meaning. By mid-century Willard Van Orman Quine, a Harvard philosopher and logician, had recognized that no exhaustive meaning of a word could be given except in relationship to the whole web of the language in which it is embedded. So it is with a page of the Talmud.

The pictorial quality of a page of Talmud and its decipherment as embodied in its layout piqued my curiosity. My plan was to turn out a simple manual on how to read it. What seemed to appear simple was not to be found in the thousands of pages that constitute the Talmud. Nevertheless, I have opted for the appearance of simplicity.

A page of Talmud constellates a history of the Jewish Diaspora, the Hebrew and the Aramaic language. Hermeneutics is its subtext.

This book was done on 50 lb. Vellum paper; graphics scanned on a Canon Scanner; output on an HP DeskJet 60c.