12 - The Mishnah

Summary

ORIGIN AND GENERAL CHARACTER

The Mishnah, universally attributed to the editorial hand of Rabbi Judah, Patriarch of the Jewish community in Palestine in the late second to the early third century, is the earliest redacted record of rabbinic opinion. The name “Mishnah,” from the Hebrew root sh-n-h, meaning “to repeat,” was used in early rabbinic circles to refer to various teachings or collections of rabbinic law, but Rabbi Judah’s Mishnah quickly gained priority and was soon known as “our Mishnah” or simply the Mishnah. The Mishnah became the foundation of virtually all subsequent rabbinic legal deliberation, constituting the organizing shank of both Talmuds (the Yerushalmi = Palestinian, and the Bavli = Babylonian).

In significant respects, the Mishnah was “revolutionary,” having no known precedent in received Jewish tradition. It is the first Jewish document after the Torah to organize an almost comprehensive system of Jewish law and practice. Nevertheless, it is unlike the Torah in virtually every quality. Its language, a new form of Hebrew, is not that of the Torah, nor does it follow the Torah in its organization of the law. Rather, it lays out its rulings in six “orders” (sedarim) arranged according to large themes and then subdivides these larger categories into “tractates” (masekhetot, singular masekhet), each devoted essentially to a single topic. (Notably, the number six has no significance in earlier Jewish traditions.) These categorical divisions were evidently invented in early rabbinic circles, if not by R. Judah himself.