Just as every cell in a human body contains a complete set of its DNA, so every page of the Talmud – the immense law code that defines traditional Jewish life and belief – encodes the whole history of Judaism. The arrangement of a page of Talmud was established in Lithuania in the 1880s, when the Widow and Brothers Romm publishing company produced the nonstandard Vilna edition of the ancient text. In its page numbering, that edition follows the system established in Italy in the 1520s, when the Christian printer Daniel Bomberg produced the first complete edition of the Talmud in the post-Gutenberg age.

Look on one side of the Talmud page, and you will find the standard commentary by Rabbi Solomon ben Isaac, known as Rashi, who lived in France in the 11th century; across from it lies the commentary of the Tosafot, a group of Rashi’s disciples who wrote in France and Germany in the 12th and 13th centuries. In the margin of many pages are the notes of Rabbenu Hananel, who was born in North Africa in the late 10th century. At the center of the page is the Gemara, the work of Babylonian rabbis of the second to fifth centuries, who were commenting on the Mishnah, the law code first put in writing in Palestine around the year 200. And the Mishnah itself contains laws and dicta dating back to the Second Temple period, possibly as far back as the fifth century B.C. E. – for believers, further still, back to the days of the Mosaic revelation on Sinai.

Now, in a development that has attracted comparatively little attention outside religious Jewish circles, a new link has been added to that ancient chain. Next month, Brooklyn-based Mesorah Publications, publisher of the Artscroll series of Jewish texts, will issue the final volume in its 73-volume English translation of the Talmud. The culmination of a 15-year, $20 million effort, this version – known as the Schottenstein Edition, after one of its chief sponsors – marks only the second time the complete Talmud has been translated into English. More importantly, it is the first English edition designed with non-experts in mind.

In the words of Rabbi Nosson Scherman, editorial director of Mesorah, the Talmud has been “really a closed book to the vast majority of English-speaking Jews. The idea was to create a volume that would elucidate it, make it comprehensible.” With its full, clear translation, helpful layout, and extensive notes, the Schottenstein Edition succeeds in making the Talmud much more accessible to a lay reader than it has ever been. According to Jacob Neusner, research professor of theology at Bard College and a leading scholar of the Talmud, it is “the one English-language rendition that in its unpretentious approach and classical accuracy renders the normative document of Judaism authentic in the idiom of intellect of a whole new generation.”

To appreciate the achievement of the Schottenstein Talmud – the product of some 80 scholars in America and Israel – it’s necessary to appreciate the peculiarities of the Talmudic text. For the Talmud is not an academic treatise, but a record of centuries of discussions on hundreds of subjects – property transactions, sacred festivals, marriage and divorce, and many more. Instead of laying down a single doctrine, it records the contrary opinions of various scholars, whose debates often take them very far from the topic at hand.

The result is a work that, in the words of the Talmudic translator Adin Steinsaltz, “is a conglomerate of law, legend, and philosophy, a blend of unique logic and shrewd pragmatism, of history and science, anecdotes, and humor.” In form, Mr. Steinsaltz goes on, its “harnessing together of diverse ideas [is] reminiscent of the modern stream-of-consciousness novel.” Clearly, this is not a book to be read, as you would read an ordinary book of prose, or even a narrative book of the Bible. It has to be studied.

Talmud study has always been at the heart of a traditional Jewish education; in the Orthodox world, it remains so today. And Mesorah Publications, whose Artscroll series of liturgical and Biblical texts are based on strictly Orthodox practice and belief, does not intend this new English-language Talmud as a substitute for the Hebrew and Aramaic original. At the beginning of each book, the Schottenstein editors print a warning that the Talmud “cannot be ‘translated,’ in the sense that one captures and transfers the meaning of words to a foreign tongue … the classic and preferred way to assimilate the intellectual majesty of the Talmud is under the guidance of a rebbe who is himself the product of a rebbe’s training.” And they affirm that the Talmud is no mere product of human intelligence, but a divinely inspired book: “the truth is contained in every volume of the Talmud.”

Perhaps it is ironic, then, that one effect of the Schottenstein Talmud is to open up the work to English-speakers, Jewish and non-Jewish, who are not Orthodox believers, and whose reading is driven more by respect and interest than faith. Until now, the only full English translation of the Talmud was the Soncino Edition, published in the 1930s and 1940s. But the Soncino follows the Hebrew-Aramaic text so closely that only experts can really understand it, making it more a crib than an elucidation. Take, for instance, a passage from tractate Sanhedrin, one of those surprisingly vivid anecdotes that makes the Talmud much more than just a compendium of laws. Here it is in the Soncino translation:

A story is related of a woman who appeared at the Beth Hammidrash of R. Meir and said to him, “Rabbi, one of you has taken me to wife by cohabitation.” Thereupon he rose up and gave her a bill of divorce, after which every one of his disciples stood up in turn and did likewise.

On its own, the meaning of this story and the reason for its inclusion are hard to discern. But now look at it in the Schottenstein translation, in which the capitalized words give a direct translation of the text, and the lowercase interpolations are the editors’ way of providing the legal and psychological background the text assumes we possess:

There was AN INCIDENT INVOLVING A WOMAN WHO CAME TO THE STUDY HALL OF R. MEIR. SHE SAID TO [R. MEIR]: MY TEACHER, ONE OF YOU in this study hall BETROTHED ME THROUGH COHABITATION. Please have that person either complete the marriage or divorce me. R. MEIR AROSE AND WROTE HER A BILL OF DIVORCE AND GAVE it TO HER, confident that his students would follow his example. [THE OTHERS] indeed AROSE and they ALL WROTE BILLS OF DIVORCE AND GAVE THEM TO HER. R. Meir thus embarrassed himself in order to save the guilty student from embarrassment.

In this way, it becomes clear that the woman in the story, by sleeping with one of Rabbi Meir’s students, had become legally betrothed to him, and was demanding to be released from the bond. Rabbi Meir and the students each volunteer to give the woman a certificate of divorce in order to spare the guilty party from having to identify himself publicly as the seducer. The purpose of the tale, it becomes clear, is to impart a moral lesson about the importance of not causing humiliation. Other stories in the same tractate, including one about a student who shows up at the study house with bad breath, drive home the point.

It is noteworthy, too, that the Schottenstein edition retains the euphemism of “cohabitation.” In this, it differs from the last attempt at translating the Talmud, the Steinsaltz Edition, which began publication (by Random House) in 1989, to great fanfare, but was never completed. Steinsaltz’s version comes right out and uses the phrase “betrothed me … through the act of intercourse,” thus making things perfectly clear. In its greater modesty, the Schottenstein Talmud hews closer to Orthodox norms. Indeed, Steinsaltz’s departure from those norms, as well as from the traditional arrangement of the Talmud page, was one of the reasons the edition never gained the support of the Orthodox community.

In the Schottenstein Talmud there is finally an English-language version that both Orthodox and non-Orthodox readers can learn from. And the richness of the Talmud is such that it has something to offer every student. As the novelist Jonathan Rosen wrote, in his book “The Talmud and the Internet”: “the Talmud itself is already so full of unlikely joinings that it seems to me for that very reason an invitation to openness.”