Rashi owes his great reputation to his commentaries on the two great works that comprehend Jewish life in its entirety, and lie at the very root of the intellectual development of Judaism, the Bible and the Talmud. His commentaries involving an enormous amount of labor are all but complete; they fail to cover only a few books of the Bible and a few treatises of the Talmud. The conjecture has been made that at first he set himself to commenting on the Talmud, and then on the Bible, because at the end of his life he expressed the wish that he might begin the Biblical commentary all over again. But this hypothesis is not justified. The unfinished state of both commentaries, especially the one on the Talmud, shows that he worked on them at the same time. But they were not written without interruption, not "in one spurt," as the college athlete might say. Rashi worked at them intermittently, going back to them again and again. It is certain that so far as the Talmudic treatises are concerned, he did not exert himself to follow the order in which they occur. He may have taken them up when he explained them in his school. But in commenting on the Bible, it seems, he adhered to the sequence of the books, for it was on the later books that he did not have the time to write commentaries. Moreover, he sometimes went back to his commentary on a Biblical book or a Talmudic treatise, not because he worked to order, like Ibn Ezra, and as circumstances dictated, but because he was not satisfied with his former attempt, and because, in the course of his study, the same subject came up for his consideration. Though the commentaries, then, were not the result of long, steady application, they demanded long-continued efforts, and they were, one may say, the business of his whole life. The rabbi Isaac of Vienna, who possessed an autograph commentary of Rashi, speaks of the numerous erasures and various marks with which it was embroidered. The commentaries of Rashi, which do not bear special titles, are not an uninterrupted exposition of the entire work under consideration, and could not be read from cover to cover without recourse to the text explained; they are rather detached glosses, postils, to borrow an expression from ecclesiastical literature, upon terms or phrases presenting some difficulties. They are always preceded by the word or words to be explained.