What is the difference between the Torah and the Talmud?

The Torah is the five books of Moses — Genesis through Deuteronomy — traditionally understood as the Written Torah, revealed at Sinai. The Talmud is something else entirely: it is the record of how generations of rabbis debated what the Torah’s often terse commandments actually require in practice. Its foundation is the Mishnah, a code of Jewish law compiled by Rabbi Judah ha-Nasi around 200-220 CE, organized by topic rather than by biblical order. Surrounding the Mishnah is the Gemara, centuries of rabbinic argument, question, and commentary on it, recorded across the Babylonian and Jerusalem academies; Mishnah plus Gemara together make up the Talmud. Where the Torah states a law in a sentence or two, the Talmud spends pages asking what that actually forbids, why, and how it applies to cases the text never imagined. This is the difference between the Written Torah and what tradition calls the Oral Torah: the Talmud claims to preserve and unpack an interpretive tradition that accompanied the written text from the start, rather than inventing new law from nothing. So the Torah is the source text; the Talmud is the argument about the source text, running roughly a millennium — from Sinai to about the sixth century CE — and still the primary lens through which observant Judaism reads the Torah’s commandments today.