Yerushalmi Ḥagigah

This passage from y. Ḥagigah 1:8, 76d addresses the sometimes weak and even nonexistent links between the Written Torah and the Oral Torah. The mishnah it takes up, m. Ḥagigah 1:8, states that in some areas of law, the rabbis’ legal determinations have little or no biblical basis, like mountains hanging from a hair or even floating in mid-air (see “Mishnah Ḥagigah”). The following passage in the Palestinian Talmud counters that image by asserting that every element of Oral Torah—even that which has yet to unfold in the schoolhouse—was revealed at Sinai. What this midrashic reading accomplishes is astonishing: Deuteronomy 9:10, the very verse that states unequivocally that the two tablets of the Law contained only the words addressed to those assembled at Sinai—that is, the Ten Commandments—and nothing more, is expounded to yield the opposite meaning, that the tablets contained every detail of the Written Torah and even the as-yet-unstated Oral Torah. Other rabbinic texts that take up this theme may be found in “Transmission and Reception of the Oral Torah.”