Seder Tannaim va-Amoraim סדר תנאים ואמוראים

A book with no author's name, and that is no loss: the whole of it is about the chain mattering more than the name.

It names its own year—1195 of the Greek count, that is 4644 from Creation. Such precision is almost unknown in ancient books, and so its date is not disputed.

Two parts. The first is the chain of transmission: from Moshe through Yehoshua, the elders, the prophets, the Men of the Great Assembly, the tannaim, the amoraim, the savoraim—to the geonim. This is what the book is opened for: it gives the order of the generations where the Talmud does not.

The second is the rules of decision. Among them the famous "the halakhah follows the later": where teachers of different generations differ, one follows the later, because he knew the earlier one's arguments and judged otherwise all the same. That rule entered Jewish law whole and works to this day.

How we use it. The years of the savoraim and the early geonim in this reference rest largely on it—sometimes alongside the Epistle of Rav Sherira Gaon, sometimes instead of it. Where it and Sherira diverge, we name both readings rather than choosing in silence.

Not to be confused with Toldot Tannaim va-Amoraim, the reference work of Rabbi Aaron Hyman published in London in the twentieth century.