The Mishnah

The first major redaction of rabbinic oral teachings is the Mishnah, an anthology of rabbinic teachings and disputes in the areas of Temple practice, ritual impurity, agricultural law, civil and criminal law, family and personal law, festivals, and liturgy. The Mishnah is traditionally attributed to the editorship of R. Judah ha-Nasi (Judah the Prince, also called simply Rabbi) around 220 CE in Galilee. The teachings of six generations of sages from the first two centuries CE are gathered together in this encyclopedic work, which served as a kind of “script” for continued “performances” and amplifications of Oral Torah in the master-student exchange. Each sage mentioned in the Mishnah is a tanna (pl., tannaim), a “repeater” of tradition. For this reason, the period from 70 to 220 CE is known as the tannaitic period, and works and teachings of this period are described as tannaitic.

The Mishnah is divided into six orders that deal primarily with agriculture (Zera‘im); festivals and holy days (Mo‘ed); women, family, and personal-status law (Nashim); torts (Nezikin); sancta (Kodashim); and purity and impurity (Tohorot). These orders are in turn divided into tractates named for the specific topics that are their concern, such as the Sabbath (Shabbat), blessings (Berakhot), divorce (Gittin), and menstrual impurity (Niddah). There are a total of sixty-three tractates in the Mishnah. Each tractate is divided into chapters, which are further divided into paragraphs, each of which is known as a mishnah (pl., mishnayot). Mishnaic texts are indicated with an m. 

Although it is true that the Mishnah discusses normative behavior in all areas of life, it is not easily classified as a law code. Basic legal definitions and requirements are not set forth; tractates often pick up in the middle of a topic and deal with borderline and exceptional cases. Many topics with no practical application (such as details of the sacrificial cult after the destruction of the Temple) are treated extensively. It also contains some aggadic—that is, nonlegal—material: occasional short narratives, bits of biblical exegesis, and gnomic sayings. More important, a great deal of the material contained in the Mishnah is encoded in the form of unresolved disputes, so that it is often quite difficult to know what the established law is. These unusual features have led scholars to describe the Mishnah as an anthology of rabbinic law and lore or a study text rather than a law code.

The Mishnah contains diverse literary genres: lists, case stories, exempla, ethical teachings, biblical exegesis, and more. Some passages betray a keen awareness on the part of the rabbis of their historical situation in a post-Temple reality, but nearly half the topics pursued in extraordinary detail assume the existence of the Temple as well as Jewish sovereignty over the land of Israel. The anthological and often counterfactual quality of the Mishnah is an obstacle to an exhaustive presentation of its contents. The Posen Library provides a representative sample of Mishnah passages drawn from across the work’s tractates. These passages showcase the diverse genres of materials found in the Mishnah: legal teachings and disputes, ethical maxims, casuistic law, narratives about rabbis, narratives about Temple practice, and biblical exegesis. In addition, they address a variety of themes and highlight particular elements of the Mishnah, such as the role of intention in determining legal actions, the establishment of legal minima, legal doubt and legal presumption, the creation of hypothetical and borderline cases, moral dilemmas, the relationship of laypersons (as opposed to rabbis) and non-Jews to the law, rabbinic nominalism, the relation of Oral Torah to Written Torah, rabbinic self-perception, distinctions of social class and gender, the adjustment of the law in light of adverse historical circumstances, accommodation to the realities of Roman Palestine, sectarian controversy, and the use of legal fiction.