 Traditional Jewish teaching maintained that at the same time as he transmitted the Written Torah, God transmitted an oral teaching to Moses that was not to be written down. This Oral teaching developed into the multi-layered work that was eventually written down as the Talmud by the end of the sixth century and that was the source of the complex practical system of law – halakhah – that governed Jewish life until the nineteenth century and continues to structure the life of contemporary Orthodox Jews. Leibowitz maintains that “religiously and from a logical and causal standpoint the Oral Law, the Halakhah, is prior to the Written Teaching” (Judaism, 12), and thus it is the Oral Torah that grants divine status to the Written Torah: