A Tractate on Prayer at the Head of the Order of Seeds

The order it opens is about agriculture: tithes, produce offerings, the sabbatical year, mixed sowing, the corner of the field left for the poor. A tractate on the recitation of the Shema and the daily prayers is not obviously agricultural, and its placement has been explained since antiquity as putting the acceptance of divine sovereignty before any of the obligations that follow from it. That reading may be right and is in any case the tradition's own. There is a further peculiarity.

In the Babylonian Talmud this is the only tractate of the order to have gemara at all: the agricultural laws applied to the land of Israel and were of limited practical concern in Babylonia, so the Babylonian academies did not develop them, while the laws of prayer applied everywhere. The Jerusalem Talmud, produced where those laws did apply, covers the order in full. The result is that a reader working through the Babylonian Talmud in order encounters this tractate and then jumps straight to the next order, leaving ten tractates of agricultural law with mishnah and no discussion attached. The gap is a piece of geography preserved in the structure of the book. It records where each Talmud was made, which obligations were live for the community that made it, and the fact that a body of law can go undeveloped not because it was rejected but because nobody in the room was farming under it.