THE TALMUD AS HYPERTEXT: This idea is not new, but it comes up twice in online articles today.

First, the Global Politician has an article, "The Future of the Book," which discusses "e-books" in relation to other ancient and modern written media. The reference to the Talmud comes up here:

E-books, counter their opponents, have changed little beyond format and medium. Audio books are more revolutionary than e-books because they no longer use visual symbols. Consider the scrolling protocols - lateral and vertical. The papyrus, the broadsheet newspaper, and the computer screen are three examples of the vertical kind. The e-book, the microfilm, the vellum, and the print book are instances of the lateral scroll. Nothing new here.

E-books are a throwback to the days of the papyrus. The text is placed on one side of a series of connected "leaves". Parchment, by comparison, was multi-paged, easily browseable, and printed on both sides of the leaf. It led to a revolution in publishing and, ultimately, to the print book. All these advances are now being reversed by the e-book, bemoan the antagonists.

The truth, as always, is somewhere in mid-ground between derision and fawning.

The e-book retains one innovation of the parchment - the hypertext. Early Jewish and Christian texts as well as Roman legal scholarship were inscribed or, later, printed, with numerous inter-textual links. The Talmud, for instance, comprises a main text (the Mishna) surrounded by references to scholarly interpretations (exegesis).

Second, Michael Frawley has an essay in KPCNews (Indiana): "A ‘words and pictures man’ looks at Web design," in which the Talmud-as-hypertext meme also appears:

The print analogs continue. We talk about "pages," but the pages don't really exist, do they? Of course not. It's just content served up on a monitor, dredged up from various files. We think of hypertext linking (all of those links you click on) as being something brand new and specific to the technology of the Web -- but they're not. Hypertext is simply a way of organizing and retrieving massive amounts of information, and you don't exactly need a computer to do that. The ancient Jewish Talmud, with its maze-like layers of texts and notes, is an early example.

The Talmud: ahead of its time.