The Mishnah – Jacob Neusner

THE MISHNAH

A New Translation

Jacob Neusner

Yale Univeristy Press
1988

INTRODUCTION

Falling into the hands of someone who has never seen this document before, the Mishnah must cause puzzlement. From the first line to the last, discourse takes up questions internal to a system that is never introduced. The Mishnah provides information without establishing context. It presents disputes about facts hardly ur­gent outside a circle of faceless disputants. Consequently, we start with the impression that we join a conversation already long under way about topics we can never grasp anyhow. Even though the language is our own, the substance is not. We shall feel as if we are in a transit lounge at a distant airport. We understand the words people say, but we are baffled by their meanings and concerns, above all, by the urgency in their voices: What are you telling me? Why must I know it? Who cares if I do not?

No one can take for granted that what is before us makes sense in any context but the Mishnah’s own, inaccessible world. Each step in the inquiry into the mean­ing and importance of the document must be laid forth with ample preparation, taken with adequate care. For before us is a remarkable statement of concerns for matters not only wholly remote from our own world but also, in the main, alien to the world of the people who made the Mishnah itself. It is as if people sat down to write letters about things they had never seen, to people they did not know—letters from an unknown city to an undefined and unimagined world: the Mishnah is from no one special in utopia, to whom it may concern.

To state matters more directly: the Mishnah does not identify its authors. It permits only slight variations, if any, in its authorities’ patterns of language and speech, so there is no place for individual characteristics of expression. It nowhere tells us when it speaks. It does not address a particular place or time and rarely speaks of events in its own day. It never identifies its prospective audience. There is scarcely a “you” in the entire mass of sayings and rules. The Mishnah begins “) nowhere. It ends abruptly. There is no predicting where it will commence or ex­plaining why it is done. Where, when, why the document is set forth are questions not deemed relevant and not answered.

Indeed, the Mishnah contains not a hint about what its authors conceive their work to be. Is it a law code? Is it a schoolbook? Since it makes statements describing what people should and should not do, or rather, do and do not do, we might suppose it is a law code. Since, as we shall see in a moment, it covers topics of both practical and theoretical interest, we might suppose it is a schoolbook. But the Mishnah never expresses a hint about its authors’ intent. The reason is that the authors do what they must to efface all traces not only of individuality but also of their own participation in the formation of the document. So it is not only a letter from utopia to whom it may concern. It also is a letter written by no one person— nor by a committee, either. Nor should we fail to notice, even at the outset, that while the Mishnah clearly addresses Israel, the Jewish people, it is remarkably indifferent to the Hebrew Scriptures. The Mishnah makes no effort at imitating the Hebrew of the Hebrew Bible, as do the writers of the Dead Sea Scrolls. The Mishnah does not attribute its sayings to biblical heroes, prophets or holy men, as do the writings of the pseudepigraphs of the Hebrew Scriptures. The Mishnah does not claim to emerge from a fresh encounter with God through revelation, as is not uncommon in Israelite writings of the preceding four hundred years; the Holy Spirit is not alleged to speak here. So all the devices by which other Israelite writers gain credence for their messages are ignored. Perhaps the authority of the Mishnah was self-evident to its authors. But, self-evident or not, the authors in no way take the trouble to explain to their document’s audience why people should conform to the descriptive statements contained in their holy book.

If then we turn to the contents of the document, we are helped not at all in determining the place of the Mishnah’s origin, its purpose, the reasons for its anonymous and collective plane of discourse and monotonous tone of voice. For the Mishnah covers a carefully defined program of topics, as I shall explain pres­ently. But the Mishnah never tells us why one topic is introduced and another is omitted, or what the agglutination of these particular topics is meant to accomplish in the formation of a system or imaginative construction. Nor is there any predicting how a given topic will be treated, why a given set of issues will be explored in close detail, and another set of possible issues ignored. Discourse on a theme begins and ends as if all things are self-evident—including, as I have said, the reason for beginning at one point and ending at some other.

In all, one might readily imagine, upon first glance at this strange and curious book, that what we have is a rule book. It appears on the surface to be a book lacking all traces of eloquence and style, revealing no evidence of system and re­flection, serving no important purpose. First glance indicates that in hand is yet another sherd from remote antiquity—no different from those upon which the king lists are inscribed, the random catalogue of (to us) useless, meaningless facts: a cookbook, a placard of posted tariffs, detritus of random information, accidentally thrown into the currents of historical time. Who would want to have made such a thing? Who would now want to refer to it?

The answer to those questions is deceptively straightforward: the Mishnah is important because it is a principal component of the canon of Judaism. Indeed, that answer begs the question: Why should some of the ancient Jews of the Holy Land have brought together these particular facts and rules into a book and set them forth for the Israelites? Why should the Mishnah have been received, as it certainly was received, as a half of the “whole Torah of Moses at Sinai”? The Mishnah was represented, soon after it was compiled, as the part of the “whole Torah of Moses, our rabbi,” which had been formulated and transmitted orally, so it bore the status of divine revelation right alongside the Pentateuch. Yet it is already entirely obvious that little in the actual contents of the document evoked the char­acter or the moral authority of the written Torah of Moses. Indeed, since most of the authorities named in the Mishnah lived in the century and a half prior to the promulgation of the document, the claim that things said by men known to the very framers of the document, in fact derived from Moses at Sinai through a long chain of oral tradition, contradicted the well-known facts of the matter. So this claim presents a paradox even on the surface: How can the Mishnah be deemed a book of religion, a program for consecration, a mode of sanctification? Why should Jews from the end of the second century to our own day have deemed the study of the Mishnah to be a holy act, a deed of service to God through the study of an important constituent of God’s Torah, God’s will for Israel, the Jewish people?

In fact, the Mishnah is precisely that, a principal holy book of Judaism. The Mishnah has been and is now memorized in the circle of all those who participate in the religion, Judaism. Of still greater weight, the two great documents formed around the Mishnah and so shaped as to serve, in part, as commentaries to the Mishnah, namely, the Babylonian Talmud and the Palestinian Talmud, form the center of the curriculum of Judaism as a living religion. Consequently, the Mishnah is necessary to the understanding of Judaism. It hardly needs saying that people interested in the study of religions surely will have to reflect upon the same questions I have formulated within the context of Judaism, namely, how such a curious com­pilation of materials may be deemed a holy book. And, self-evidently, scholars of the formative centuries of Christianity, down to the recognition of Christianity as a legal religion in the fourth century, will be glad to have access to a central doc­ument of the kind of Judaism taking shape at precisely the same time as the Chris­tianity studied by them was coming into being. In all, we need not apologize for our interest in this sizable monument to the search for a holy way of life for Israel represented, full and whole, in this massive thing, the Mishnah.

Let me now briefly describe the Mishnah. It is a six-part code of descriptive rules formulated toward the end of the second century a.d. by a small number of Jewish sages and put forth as the constitution of Judaism under the sponsorship of Judah the Patriarch, the head of the Jewish community of Palestine at the end of that century. The Mishnah is important because it forms the foundation for the Baby­lonian and Palestinian Taimuds. It therefore stands alongside the Hebrew Bible as the holy book upon which the Judaism of the past nineteen hundred years is con­structed. The six divisions are: (1) agricultural rules; (2) laws governing appointed seasons, that is, Sabbaths and festivals; (3) laws on the transfer of women and property along with women from one man (father) to another (husband); (4) the system of civil and criminal law (corresponding to what we today should regard as “the legal system”); (5) laws for the conduct of the cult and the Temple; and (6) laws on the preservation of cultic purity both in the Temple and under certain domestic circumstances, with special reference to the table and bed. These divisions define the range and realm of reality.

The Mishnah in Context: Israelite History in the Later First and Second Centuries

The world addressed by the Mishnah is hardly congruent to the world view pre­sented within the Mishnah. Let us now consider the time and context in which the document took shape. The Mishnah is made up of sayings bearing the names of authorities who lived in the late first and second centuries. (The book contains very little in the names of people who lived before the destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem in a.d. 70.) These authorities generally fall into two groups, namely, two distinct sets of names, each set of names randomly appearing together, but rarely, if ever, with names of the other set. The former set of names is generally supposed to represent authorities who lived between the destruction of the Temple in 70 and the advent of the second war against Rome, led by Simeon Bar Kokhba, in 132. The latter set of names belongs to authorities who flourished between the end of that war, ca. 135, and the end of the second century. The Mishnah itself is generally supposed to have come to closure at the end of the second century, and its date, for conventional purposes only, is ca. a.d. 200. Now, of these two groups—sages from 70-130, and from 135-200—the latter is represented far more abundantly than the former. Approximately two thirds of the named sayings belong to mid- second-century authorities. This is not surprising, since these are the named au­thorities whose (mainly unnamed) students collected, organized, and laid out the document as we now have it. So, in all, the Mishnah represents the thinking of Jewish sages who flourished in the middle of the second century. It is that group which took over whatever they had in hand from the preceding century—and from the whole legacy of Israelite literature even before that time—and revised and reshaped the whole in the Mishnah. Let us briefly consider their world.

In the aftermath of the war against Rome in a.d. 132-135, the Temple was declared permanently prohibited to Jews, and Jerusalem was closed off to them as well. So there was no cult, no Temple, no holy city, to which, at this time, the description of the Mishnaic laws applied. We observe at the very outset, therefore, that a sizable proportion of the Mishnah deals with matters to which the sages had no material access or practical knowledge at the time of their work. For we have seen that the Mishnah contains a division on the conduct of the cult, namely, the fifth, as well as one on the conduct of matters so as to preserve the cultic purity of the sacrificial system along the lines laid out in the book of Leviticus, the sixth division. In fact, a fair part of the second division, on appointed times, takes up the conduct of the cult on special days, for example, the sacrifices offered on the Day of Atonement, Passover, and the like. Indeed, what the Mishnah wants to know about appointed seasons concerns the cult far more than it does the syn­agogue. The fourth division, on civil law, for its part, presents an elaborate account of a political structure and system of Israelite self-government, in tractates Sanhe­drin and Makkot, not to mention Shabuot and Horayot. This system speaks of king, priest, Temple, and court. But it was not the Jews, their kings, priests, and judges, but the Romans, who conducted the government of Israel in the Land of Israel in the time in which the second-century authorities did their work. So it would appear that well over half of the document before us speaks of cult, Temple, government, priesthood. As we shall see, moreover, the Mishnah takes up a profoundly priestly and Levitical conception of sanctification. When we consider that, in the very time in which the authorities before us did their work, the Temple lay in ruins, the city of Jerusalem was prohibited to all Israelites, and the Jewish government and ad­ministration, which had centered on the Temple and based its authority on the holy life lived there, were in ruins, the fantastic character of the Mishnah’s address to its own catastrophic day becomes clear. Much of the Mishnah speaks of matters not in being in the time in which the Mishnah was created, because the Mishnah wishes to make its statement on what really matters.

In the age beyond catastrophe, the problem is to reorder a world off course and adrift, to gain reorientation for an age in which the sun has come out after the night and the fog. The Mishnah is a document of imagination and fantasy, describing how things “are” out of the sherds and remnants of reality, but, in larger measure, building social being out of beams of hope. The Mishnah tells us something about how things were, but everything about how a small group of men wanted things to be. The document is orderly, repetitious, careful in both language and message. It is small-minded, picayune, obvious, dull, routine—everything its age was not. The Mishnah stands in contrast with the world to which it speaks. Its message is one of small achievements and modest hope. It means to defy a world of large disorders and immodest demands. The heirs of heroes build an unheroic folk in the new and ordinary age. The Mishnah’s message is that what a person wants matters in im­portant ways. It states that message to an Israelite world which can shape affairs in no important ways and speaks to people who by no means will the way things now are. The Mishnah therefore lays down a practical judgment upon, and in favor of, the imagination and will to reshape reality, regain system, reestablish that order upon which trustworthy existence is to be built.

If we now ask ourselves why people in our own age should take an interest in that long-ago time, the answer is not difficult to find. And it is not a claim for mere antiquarianism, let alone knowledge “for its own sake”—whatever that might mean. The sages of the Mishnah addressed Israel at the very end of its thousand-year life of sanctification through God’s service in the Temple, of anointed kings and holy priests organizing (at least in theory) time and space of the land in accord with the model of the sacred Temple and along lines of structure emanating therefrom. The Mishnah, we notice, is the work of men who had survived the second war against Rome. Now when we realize that that war was fought roughly three generations after the destruction of the Temple, we notice yet another point of importance. When the Temple had been destroyed earlier, in 586 b.c., the prophetic promises of divine forgiveness had been kept. So the Temple was restored: Israel regained its homeland. Now, half a millennium later, the Temple had lain in ruins for another three generations. A great and noble war had been fought to regain Jerusalem, rebuild the Temple, and restore the cult. But what had happened was incompre­hensible. The pattern established in the first destruction and restoration now proved no longer to hold. Indeed, nothing stood firm. This time around, not only was the Temple not rebuilt, the cult not restored. Jerusalem itself was declared off-limits to Israelites. The very center was made inaccessible.

In this context, it is not difficult to look for points of commonality between one age of uncertainty and another, also cut loose from ancient moorings. What the second-century sages of the Mishnah have to teach the generations of the last de­cades of the twentieth century and the first of the twenty-first, is how to make use of imagination and fantasy to confront, defy, and overcome chaos and disorder. Behind the Mishnah lay the ruins of half a millennium of orderly and systematic Israelite life which had been centered on the regular and reliable offering of the produce of the field and flock upon the altar of the Temple in Jerusalem, the ordering of society around that Temple, the rhythmic division of time in response to that cult, and the placing of people and things into their proper station in relationship to that center. One disastrous war had ended in the destruction of the Temple. The second, three generations later, had made certain it would not be rebuilt in the foreseeable future—nor, as it now appears, ever. In the aftermath of these two terrible wars the Israelite nation entered upon an existence far more precarious in mind than in material reality. Within a century the social and agri­cultural effects of the wars had worn off. Galilean synagogues of the third and fourth centuries testify to an age of material surplus and good comfort. But it would be a very long time before the psychological effects of dislocation and disorientation would pass. In some ways they never have. Our age, which looks back upon the destruction of enduring political and social arrangements in the aftermath of two terrible wars (with numerous skirmishes in between and since), has the power to confront the second century’s world of ancient Judaism, because, it seems, there is a measure of existential congruence between the two ages and their common prob­lems. For both are the kind which challenge the imagination and the will.

Now it is one thing to point out why, in general, a person in a wholly alien world might want to open the pages of this book. It is quite another to explain what one should look for and actually seek in reading what these people say. For those questions I asked at the outset, about why people then should have talked about an imaginary world and even today may want to listen to this incomprehensible chatter about what then was not and what today lies even beyond ordinary com­prehension—those questions have to be answered in all the specificity of the hundreds of chapters, set forth in the dozens of tractates, of which the Mishnah is composed. This brings me to the three concrete matters worth protracted attention (as mere history is not): (1) the specific modes of discourse attained by the Mishnah; (2) the system of world building laid forth in the Mishnah; and (3) the interplay between that system and the massive heritage of Scripture which lay behind the Mishnah. These three things—language, system, heritage—have now to be ex­plained.

Before proceeding, however, I want to point out to the reader the obvious fact that, for the period in which the Mishnah was taking shape, the Mishnah is hardly the only, or the most important, historical source. While up to now I have insisted on dealing with this particular document alone and have emphasized what is to be learned about the people behind it, we must now remind ourselves of two things.

First, the people who produced the Mishnah may well have produced other doc­uments, or, more important, materials now incorporated in other, later documents, which surfaced only after the Mishnah was completed in a.d. 200. So we cannot suppose that all we know about the framers of the Mishnah derives from the Mish­nah.

Second, in the same period as that in which the Mishnah’s sages flourished, other Jews developed their own ideas. Many of these ideas may be shown to have entered into documents, also accepted by the Talmudic rabbis, which came to formation and completion after the Mishnah, even long afterward. Consequently, we have to see the Mishnah as only one important document of its day and of its group. We have, further, to understand that, in the formation of Judaism on the foundations of the Mishnah, much done in the Mishnah’s own day would find its place only later on.

We have sound reason to believe that, in the later first and second centuries, there were important Jewish institutions of politics, culture, and religion (in those times, they were not so easy to differentiate), such as a court system, a patriarch (or ruler of the Jewish community of the Holy Land), academies, synagogues, and the like. To treat as if they did not exist ideas and institutions not attested in the book before us may well carry us deep into the world view of the people whose creative imagination is richly, if tediously, revealed in the pages of this book. But it would not provide us with an exhaustive and reliable account of the world actually viewed by those people, I mean, the world of the Jewish people of the first and second centuries in the Land of Israel. There is more to be learned about the Mishnah’s context than the Mishnah tells us. That is all the more reason to receive the Mishnah as a powerful judgment upon its times, not merely a report about them. It is all the more necessary to see the Mishnah as an effort to respond in a systematic and encompassing way to a whole and total encounter with the world, not merely as a set of rules and regulations.

Through regulating a world constructed mainly in mind, the sages of the Mishnah built a world that would endure from their time to ours. In exercising the power of the mind and the heart to find order in chaos and reframe a reliable and predictable mode of being in an age of successive calamities, these sages erected a vast con­struction of philosophy and theology, law and hermeneutics, social policy and me­taphysical theory. To ask them to tell us, in addition, what—in general—happens to have happened in their day and age is to ask a master chef to boil a hot dog. So now let us return to the matter before us, not what we do not find but what we do. We begin with language, for if this translation has any merit at all, it is, as I have claimed, in allowing you to confront the odd and strange utilization of a common language, Middle Hebrew, by the framers of the Mishnah. As I shall now show, what is even more important is to reflect upon the meaning of how language is used in this book.

Language: The Mishnah’s Patterned Language and its Forms

Since the special claim of this book is to present a literal translation of the Mishnah, adhering closely to its word order, syntax, and formal patterns, I shall dwell on the explanation of the language and forms of the document. Discussion of the other two matters—the Mishnah’s substance and the Mishnah’s relationship to its biblical heritage—will be much briefer.

Let us start our study of the language of the Mishnah with the simple question of how the document is organized. The answer is that the preferred mode of layout is through themes spelled out along the lines of the logic imbedded in those themes. The Mishnah is divided up, as we already know, into six principal divisions, each expounding a single, immense topic. The tractates of each division take up subtopics of the principal theme. The chapters then unfold along the lines of the (to the framers) logic of the necessary dissection of the division. While that mode of or­ganization may appear to be necessary or “self-evident” (it is how we should have written a law code, is it not?), we should notice that there are three others found within the document but not utilized extensively or systematically. These therefore represent rejected options. One way is to collect diverse sayings around the name of a given authority. (The whole of tractate Eduyyot is organized in that way.) A second way is to express a given basic principle through diverse topics, for example, a fundamental rule cutting across many areas of law, stated in one place through all of the diverse types of law through which the rule or principle may be expressed. A third way is to take a striking language pattern and collect sayings on diverse topics which conform to the given language pattern. (There also is the possibility of joining the second and the third ways.) Faced with these possible ways of or­ganizing materials, the framers of the Mishnah chose to adhere to a highly disci­plined thematic-logical principle of organization.

In antiquity, paragraphing and punctuation were not commonly used. Long col­umns of words would contain a text—as in the Torah today—and the student of the text had the task of breaking up those columns into tractates, chapters, sen­tences, large and small sense units. Now if we had the entire Mishnah in a single immense scroll and spread the scroll out on the ground—it might extend the length of a football field!—we should have no difficulty at all discovering the point, on the five-yard line, at which the first tractate ends and the second begins, and so on down the field to the opposite goal. For, from Berakhot at the beginning to Uqsin at the end, the breaking points practically jump up from the ground like white lines of lime: change of principal topic. So, the criterion of division, internal to the document and not merely imposed by copyists and printers, is thematic. That is, the tractates are readily distinguishable from one another since each treats a distinct topic. Thus, if Mishnah were to be copied out in a long scroll without the signifi­cance of lines of demarcation among the several tractates, the opening pericope of each tractate would leave no doubt that one topic had been completed and a new one undertaken.

The same is so within the tractates. Intermediate divisions of these same principal divisions are to be discerned on the basis of internal evidence, through the conflu­ence of theme and form. That is to say, a given intermediate division of a principal one (a chapter of a tractate) will be marked by a particular, recurrent, formal pattern in accord with which sentences are constructed, and also by a particular and distinct theme, to which these sentences are addressed. When a new theme commences, a fresh formal pattern will be used. Within the intermediate divisions, we are able to recognize the components, or smallest whole units of thought (hereinafter, cog­nitive units), because there will be a recurrent pattern of sentence structure re­peated time and again within the unit and a shift in that pattern at the commencement of the next theme. Each point at which the recurrent pattern com­mences marks the beginning of a new cognitive unit. In general, an intermediate division will contain a carefully enumerated sequence of exempla of cognitive units, in the established formal pattern, commonly in groups of three or five or multiples of three or five (pairs for the first division).

The cognitive units resort to a remarkably limited repertoire of formulary pat­terns. The authors of the Mishnah manage to say whatever they want in one of the following:

1. the simple declarative sentence, in which the subject, verb, and predicate are syntactically tightly joined to one another, for example, He who does so and so is such and such’,

2. the duplicated subject, in which the subject of the sentence is stated twice, for example, He who does so and so, lo, he is such and such ;
3. mild apocopation, in which the subject of the sentence is cut off from the verb, which refers to its own subject, and not the one with which the sentence commences, for example, He who does so and so …, it [the thing he has done] is such and such;
4. extreme apocopation, in which a series of clauses is presented, none of them tightly joined to what precedes or follows, and all of them cut off from the predicate of the sentence, for example, He who does so and so . . ., it [the thing he has done] is such and such . . ., it is a matter of doubt whether … or whether . . . lo, it [referring to nothing in the antecedent, apocopated clauses of the subject of the sentence] is so and so .. .
5. In addition to these formulary patterns, in which the distinctive formulary traits are effected through variations in the relationship between the subject and the predicate of the sentence, or in which the subject itself is given a distinctive development, there is yet a fifth. In this we have a contrastive complex predicate, in which case we may have two sentences, independent of one another, yet clearly formulated so as to stand in acute balance with one another in the predicate, thus, He who does … is unclean, and he who does not… is clean.

It naturally will be objected: Is it possible that a simple declarative sentence may be asked to serve as a formulary pattern, alongside the rather distinctive and un­usual constructions which follow? True, by itself, a tightly constructed sentence consisting of subject, verb, and complement, in which the verb refers to the subject, and the complement to the verb, hardly exhibits traits of particular formal interest. Yet a sequence of such sentences, built along the same elementary grammatical lines, may well exhibit a clear-cut and distinctive pattern. When we see that three or five “simple declarative sentences” take up one principle or problem, and then, when the principle or problem shifts, a quite distinctive formal pattern will be utilized, we realize that the “simple declarative sentence” has served the formulator of the unit of thought as aptly as did apocopation, a dispute, or another more obviously distinctive form or formal pattern. The contrastive predicate is one ex­ample: the Mishnah contains many more.

The important point of differentiation, particularly for the simple declarative sentence, appears in the interplay between theme and form within the intermediate unit. It is there that we see a single pattern recurring in a long sequence of sentences, for example, the X which has lost its Y is unclean because of its Z. The Z which has lost its Y is unclean because of its X. Another example is a long sequence of highly developed sentences, laden with relative clauses and other explanatory mat­ter, in which a single syntactical pattern will govern the articulation of three or six or nine exempla. That sequence will be followed by one repeated terse sentence pattern, for example, X is so and so, Y is such and such, Z is thus and so. The former group will treat one principle or theme, the latter some other. There can be no doubt, therefore, that the declarative sentence in recurrent patterns is, in its way, just as carefully formalized as a sequence of severely apocopated sentences or contrastive predicates or duplicated subjects.

In order to appreciate the highly formal character of the Mishnah, we turn to its correlative document, Tosefta, a corpus of supplementary materials serving to aug­ment, amplify, and expand the Mishnah in various ways, brought to redaction be­tween ca. a.d. 200 and 400. Tosefta’s tractates follow those of the Mishnah. This is hardly surprising, since Tosefta is a supplement to the Mishnah. When, however, we examine the ways in which Tosefta’s tractates are subdivided, we do not see the slightest effort to group materials in accord with a confluence of common theme and form, or to redact intermediate divisions in accord with a single fixed number of exempla, for example, three’s or five’s. Furthermore, Tosefta’s units of thought are not highly patterned and exhibit none of the traits of carefully stylized formu­lation which we find in the Mishnah—except in those pericopae in which the Mish­nah itself is cited and glossed (and they are many). Accordingly, Tosefta, a document dependent on the Mishnah, in no way exhibits careful traits of structured redaction, formal correspondence between formulary patterns and distinctive themes, for the internal demarcation of an intermediate division, or highly formal­ized formulation of individual units of thought. The Mishnah’s traits emerge most clearly in the contrast established by its supplementary document. The mode of grouping cognitive units in Tosefta is in accord with one of three fixed relationships to the Mishnah. Pericopae which cite the Mishnah verbatim will stand together. There commonly will follow units which do not cite the Mishnah but which clearly complement the principal document, augmenting its materials in some obvious ways. And, at the end will be grouped together still other groups which supplement the Mishnah but which in no clear way depend upon the Mishnah for full and exhaustive exegesis. Accordingly, Tosefta’s arrangement of its materials clearly relates to the Mishnah; and the contrast in the ways in which the Mishnah’s own groups of cog­nitive units are set forth could not be more blatant.

This brief survey of the literary traits of the Mishnah permits us to turn to the question: What is to be learned about the authorities who bear responsibility for the peculiar way in which the Mishnah is formulated and redacted from the way in which they express their ideas? We speak, in particular, of the final generation represented in the Mishnah itself, the authorities of the period ca. a.d. 200 who gave the document its present literary character.

The dominant stylistic trait of the Mishnah as they formulated it is the acute formalization of its syntactical structure, and its carefully framed sequences of for­malized language, specifically, its intermediate divisions, so organized that the limits of a theme correspond to those of a formulary pattern. The balance and order of the Mishnah are particular to the Mishnah. It now must be asked to testify to the intentions of the people who so made it. About whom does it speak? And why, in particular, have its authorities distinctively shaped language in rhymes and bal­anced, matched, declarative sentences, imposing upon the conceptual, factual prose of the law a peculiar kind of poetry? Why do they create rhythmic order, gram­matically balanced sentences containing discrete law, laid out in what seem to be carefully enumerated sequences, and the like? Language not only contains culture, which could not exist without it. Language, in our case, linguistic and syntactical style and stylization, expresses a world view and ethos. Whose world view is con­tained and expressed in the Mishnah’s formalized rhetoric?

There is no reason to doubt that if one could ask the authorities behind the Mishnah the immediate purpose of their systematic use of formalized language, their answer would be to facilitate memorization. For that is the proximate effect of the acute formalization of their document. Much in its character can be seen as mnemonic.

So the Mishnah’s is language for an occasion. The occasion is particular: for­mation and transmission of special sorts of conceptions in a special way. The pre­dominant, referential function of language, giving verbal structure to the message itself, is secondary in our document. The expressive function, conveying the speak­er’s attitude toward what he is talking about, the conative function, focusing upon who is being addressed, and other ritualized functions of language come to the fore. The Mishnah’s language, therefore, as I have said, is special, meant as an expression of a nonreferential function. So far as the Mishnah was meant to be memorized by a distinctive group of people for an extraordinary purpose, it is language which includes few and excludes many, unites those who use it, and sets them apart from others who do not.

The formal aspects of Mishnaic rhetoric are empty of content. This is proved by the fact that pretty much all themes and conceptions can be reduced to the same few formal patterns. These patterns are established by syntactical recurrences, as distinct from recurrence of sounds. The same words do not recur. Long sequences of patterned and disciplined sentences fail to repeat the same words—that is, syl­labic balance, rhythm, or sound—yet they do establish a powerful claim to order and formulary sophistication and perfection. That is why we could name a pattern— he who … it is . . .—apocopation: the arrangement of the words as a grammatical pattern, not their substance, is indicative of pattern. Accordingly, while we have a document composed along what clearly are mnemonic lines, the Mishnah’s suscep­tibility to memorization rests principally upon the utter abstraction of recurrent syntactical patterns, rather than on the concrete repetition of particular words, rhythms, syllabic counts, or sounds.

A sense for the deep, inner logic of word patterns, of grammar and syntax, rather than for their external similarities, governs the Mishnaic mnemonic. And that yields the fundamental point of this analysis: Even though the Mishnah is to be memorized and handed on orally, it expresses a mode of thought attuned to abstract relation­ships, rather than concrete and substantive forms. The formulaic, not the formal, character of the Mishnaic rhetoric yields a picture of a subculture—the sages who made up the book—which speaks of immaterial, and not material, things. In this subculture the relationship, rather than the thing or person which is related, is primary, constitutes the principle of reality. The thing in itself is less than the thing in cathexis with other things, so too the person. It is self-evident that the repetition of form creates form. But what is repeated, as I have explained, is not external or superficial form. Rather we find formulary patterns of deep syntax, patterns effected through persistent grammatical or syntactical relationships and affecting an infinite range of diverse objects and topics. Form and structure emerge not from concrete, formal things but from abstract and unstated, but ubiquitous and powerful rela­tionships.

This fact—the creation of pattern through grammatical relationship of syntactical elements, more than through concrete sounds—tells us that the people who mem­orized conceptions reduced to these particular forms were capable of extraordinarily abstract cognition and perception. Hearing peculiarities of word order in diverse cognitive contexts, their ears and minds perceived regularities of grammatical ar­rangement, repeated functional variations of utilization of diverse words. They grasped from such subtleties syntactical patterns not expressed by recurrent external phenomena such as sounds, rhythms, or key words, and autonomous of particular meanings. What they heard, it is clear, were not only abstract relationships but also principles conveyed along with and through these relationships. For, I repeat, what was memorized was a recurrent and fundamental notion, expressed in diverse ex­amples but in recurrent rhetorical-syntactical patterns. Accordingly, what the mem­orizing student of a sage could and did hear was what lay far beneath the surface of the rule: the unstated principle, the unsounded pattern. This means that the prevalent mode of thought was attuned to what lay beneath the surface; minds and ears perceived what was not said behind what was said and how it was said. They besought that ineffable and metaphysical reality concealed within yet conveyed through spoken and palpable material reality.

Social interrelationships within the community of Israel are left behind in the ritual speech of the Mishnah, just as, within the laws, natural realities are made to give form and expression to supernatural or metaphysical regularities. The Mishnah speaks of Israel, but the speakers are a group apart. The Mishnah talks of this- worldly things, but the things stand for and speak of another world entirely. The language of the Mishnah and its formalized grammatical rhetoric create a world of discourse quite separate from the concrete realities of a given time, place, or society. The exceedingly limited repertoire of grammatical patterns by which all things on all matters are said gives symbolic expression to the notion that beneath the acci­dents of life are a few comprehensive relationships. Unchanging and enduring pat­terns lie deep in the inner structure of reality and impose structure upon the accidents of the world. This means, as I have implied, that reality for Mishnaic rhetoric consists in the grammar and syntax of language: consistent and enduring patterns of relationship among diverse and changing concrete things or persons. What lasts is not the concrete thing but the abstract interplay governing any and all sorts of concrete things.

There is, therefore, a congruence between rhetorical patterns of speech, on the one side, and the substantive framework of discourse established by these same patterns, on the other. Just as we accomplish memorization by perceiving not what is said but how it is said and is persistently arranged, so we speak to undertake to address and describe a world in which what is concrete and material is secondary. How things are said about what is concrete and material in diverse ways and contexts is principal. The Mishnah is silent about the context of its speech—place and time and circumstance—because context is trivial. Principle, beginning in syntactical principles by which all words are arranged in a severely limited repertoire of gram­matical sentences ubiquitously pertinent but rarely made explicit, is at the center.

The skill of the formulators of the Mishnah is to manipulate the raw materials of everyday speech. What they have done is so to structure language as to make it strange, to impose a fresh perception upon what to others (and what in Tosefta) are merely unpatterned and ordinary ways of saying things. What is said in the Mishnah is simple. How it is said is arcane. Ordinary folk cannot have had much difficulty understanding the words which refer to routine actions and objects. How long it must have taken to grasp the meaning of the patterns into which the words are arranged! How hard it was and is to do so is suggested (at the very least) by the necessity for the creation of Tosefta, the Taimuds, and the commentaries in the long centuries since the Mishnah came into being. In this sense the Mishnah speaks openly about public matters, yet its deep structure of syntax and grammatical forms shapes what is said into an essentially secret and private language. It takes many years to master the difficult argot, though only a few minutes to memorize the simple patterns. That constitutes a paradox reflective of the situation of the creators of the Mishnah.

Up to now I have said only a little about tense structure. The reason is that the Mishnah exhibits remarkable indifference to the potentialities of meaning inherent therein. Its persistent preference for the plural participle, thus the descriptive pre­sent tense—“they do . . . ,” “one does . . . ,”—is matched by its capacity to accept the mixture of past, present, and future tenses. These can be found jumbled to­gether in a single sentence and, even more commonly, in a single pericope. It follows that the Mishnah is remarkably uninterested in differentiation of time sequences. This fact is most clearly shown by the gemisch of the extreme apocopated sentence with its capacity to support something like the following: “He who does so and so . . . the rain came and wet it down … if he was happy … it [is] under the law, If water be put.” Clearly, the matter of tense, past, present, future, is conventional. Highly patterned syntax clearly is meant to preserve what is said without change (even though we know changes in the wording of traditions were effected for many centuries thereafter). The language is meant to be unshakable. Its strict rules of rhetoric are meant not only to convey but also to preserve equally strict rules of logic, equally permanent patterns of relationship. What was at stake in this for­mation of language in the service of permanence? Clearly, how things were said was intended to secure eternal preservation of what was said. Change affects the accidents and details. It cannot reshape enduring principles. Language will be used to effect and protect their endurance. What is said, moreover, is not to be subjected to pragmatic experimentation. Unstated, but carefully considered, principles shape reality. They are not shaped and tested by and against reality. Use of pat phrases and syntactical cliches, divorced from different thoughts to be said and different ways of thinking, testifies to the prevailing notion of unstated, but secure and unchanging, reality behind and beneath the accidents of context and circumstance: God is one, God’s world is in order, each line carefully drawn, all structures fully coherent.

Two facts have been established.

First, the formalization of the Mishnaic thought units is separate from the utili­zation of sound, rhythm, and extrinsic characteristics of word choice. It depends, rather, upon recurrent grammatical patterns independent of the choices of words set forth in strings. The listener or reader has to grasp relations of words in a given sequence of sentences quite separate from the substantive character of the words themselves.

Second, the natural language of Middle Hebrew, as the Mishnah’s kind of Hebrew is called, is not apt to be represented by the highly formal language of Mishnah. Mishnaic language constitutes something more than a random sequence of words used routinely to say things. It is meant as a highly formulaic way of expressing a particular set of distinctive conceptions. It is, therefore, erroneous to refer to Mish­naic language. Rather, we deal with the Mishnaic revision of the natural language of Middle Hebrew. And, it is clear, what Mishnah does to revise that natural lan­guage is ultimately settled in the character of the grammar, inclusive of syntax, of the language. Middle Hebrew has a great many more grammatical sequences than does Mishnaic Hebrew. It follows, Mishnaic Hebrew declares ungrammatical—that is, refuses to make use of—constructions which Middle Hebrew will regard as wholly grammatical and entirely acceptable. The single striking trait of the for­malization of Mishnaic language, therefore, is that it depends upon grammar. And just as Chomsky says, “Grammar is autonomous and independent of meaning,” so in the Mishnah, the formalization of thought into recurrent patterns is beneath the surface and independent of discrete meanings. Yet Mishnah imposes its own dis­cipline, therefore its own deeper level of unitary meaning, upon everything and anything which actually is said.

So there are these two striking traits of mind reflected within Mishnaic rhetoric; first, the perception of order and balance; second, the perception of the mind’s centrality in the construction of order and balance, that is, the imposition of whole­ness upon discrete cases in the case of the routine declarative sentence and upon discrete phrases in the case of the apocopated one. Both order and balance are contained from within and are imposed from without. The relationships revealed by grammatical consistencies internal to a sentence and the implicit regularities revealed by the congruence and cogency of cases rarely are stated. But they always are to be discerned. Accordingly, the one thing which Mishnah invariably does not make explicit but which always is necessary to know is, I stress, the presence of the active intellect, the participant who is the hearer. It is the hearer who ultimately makes sense of, perceives the sense in, the Mishnah. Once more we are impressed by the Mishnah’s expectation of sophistication and profound sensitivity to order and form on the part of its impalpable audience. Again we note that, to the Mish­nah, the human mind imposes meaning and sense upon the world of sense percep­tions.

In this sense the Mishnah serves both as a book of laws and as a book for learners, a law code and a schoolbook. But it is in this sense alone.

If the Mishnah is a law code, it is remarkably reticent about punishments for infractions of its rules. It rarely says what one must do or must not do, if he or she becomes unclean. The Mishnah hardly even alludes to punishments or rewards consequent upon disobedience or obedience to its laws. Clean and unclean rhetor­ically are the end of the story and generate little beyond themselves.

If the Mishnah serves as a schoolbook, it never informs us about its institutional setting, speaks of its teachers, sets clear-cut, perceptible, educational goals for its students, nor, above all, attempts to stand in relationship to some larger curriculum or educational and social structure. Its lack of context and unselfconscious frame­work of discourse hardly support the view that, in a this-worldly and ordinary sense, we have in our hands a law code or a schoolbook.

Nor is the Mishnah a corpus of “traditions,” that is, true teachings which lay claim to authority or to meaning by virtue of the authorities cited therein. That is why the name of an authority rarely serves as a redactional fulcrum. It is also why the tense structure is ahistorical and antihistorical. Sequences of actions generally are stated other than in the descriptive present tense. Rules attain authority not because of who says them but because (it would seem) no specific party, at a specific time, stands behind them. The Mishnah, as I have emphasized, is descriptive of how things are. It is indifferent to who has said so, uninterested in the cumulative past behind what it has to say. These are not the traits of a corpus of “traditions.” I am inclined to think that law code, schoolbook, and corpus of traditions all are not quite to the point of the accurate characterization of the Mishnah.

Yet, if not quite to the point, all nonetheless preserve a measure of proximate relevance to the definition of the Mishnah. The Mishnah does contain descriptive laws. These laws require the active participation of the mind of the hearer, thus are meant to be learned through reason, not merely obeyed as ritual, and self-evidently are so shaped as to impart lessons, not merely rules to be kept. The task of the hearer is not solely or primarily to obey, though I think obedience is taken for granted. The Mishnah calls one to participate in the process of discovering principles and uncovering patterns of meaning. The very form of the Mishnaic rhetoric, its formalization and function of that form—all testify to the role of the learner and hearer, that is, the student, in the process of definitive and indicative description (not communication) of what is, and of what is real.

Self-evidently, the Mishnah’s persistent citation of authorities makes explicit the claim that some men, now dead, have made their contribution and, therefore, have given shape and substance to tradition, that tradition which is shaped by one and handed onward by another. Choices were made: authorities made them. So the Mishnah indeed is, and therefore is meant as, a law code, a schoolbook, and a corpus of tradition. It follows that the purpose for which the Mishnah was edited into final form was to create such a multipurpose document, a tripartite goal at­tained in a single corpus of formed and formal sayings. And yet it is obvious that the Mishnah is something other than these three things in one. It transcends the three and accomplishes more than the triple goals which on the surface form the constitutive components of its purpose.

To describe that transcendent purpose and conclude this discussion, we turn to Wittgenstein’s saying, “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.”

On the one side, the Mishnah’s formulaic rhetoric imposes limits, boundaries, upon the world. What fits into that rhetoric and can be said by it constitutes world, world given shape and boundary by the Mishnah. The Mishnah implicitly maintains, therefore, that a wide range of things fall within the territory mapped out by a limited number of linguistic conventions, grammatical sentences. What is gram­matical can be said and, therefore, constitutes part of the reality created by the Mishnaic word. What cannot be contained within the grammar of the sentence cannot be said and therefore falls outside the realm of the Mishnaic reality. The Mishnaic reality consists in those things which can attain order, balance, and prin­ciple. Chaos lies without.

On the other side, if we may extrapolate from the capacity of the impoverished repertoire of grammar before us to serve for all sorts of things, then we must concede that all things can be said by formal revision. Everything can be reformed, reduced to the order and balance and exquisite sense for the just match, charac­teristic of the Mishnaic pericope. Anything of which we wish to speak is susceptible to the ordering and patterning of the Mishnaic grammar and syntax. That is a fact which is implicit throughout the Mishnah. Accordingly, the territory mapped out by the Mishnaic language encompasses the whole of the pertinent world under discussion. There are no thematic limitations of the Mishnaic formalized speech.

Clearly, the Mishnaic language is formulated in a disciplined and systematic way. We therefore must now ask how the language of the Mishnah adumbrates the character and concerns of the Mishnah’s substantive ideas, its religious world view and the way of life formulated to express that world view. For I maintain that the document before us constitutes much more than an ancient rule book of no special interest or humanistic value which happens to have survived. The Mishnah is, rather, a book deliberately formed for the very group—Israel—and purpose which, for nearly nineteen centuries, it indeed has served. So the language just now described, as much as the system awaiting description, has to be asked to testify to the meaning and purpose of the whole.

The “Judaism” expressed by the Mishnah not only speaks about values. Its mode of speech—the way it speaks, not only what it says—is testimony to its highest and most enduring, distinctive value. Now let us take note. This language does not speak of sacred symbols but of pots and pans, of menstruation and dead creeping things; of ordinary water which, because of the circumstance of its collection and location, possesses extraordinary power; of the commonplace corpse and ubiquitous diseased person; of genitalia and excrement, toilet seats, and the flux of penises; of stems of pomegranates and stalks of leeks; of rain and earth and wood, metal, glass, and hide. This language is filled with words for neutral things of humble existence. It does not speak of holy things and is not symbolic in its substance. This language speaks of ordinary things, of things which everyone must have known. But because of the peculiar and particular way in which it is formed and formalized, this same language not only adheres to an aesthetic theory but expresses a deeply embedded ontology and methodology of the sacred, specifically of the sacred within the secular, and of the capacity for regulation, therefore for sanctification, within the ordinary: All things in order, all things then hallowed by God who orders all things, so said the priests’ creation tale.

To conclude: world view and ethos are synthesized in language. The synthesis is expressed in grammatical and syntactical regularities. What is woven into some sort of ordered whole is not a cluster of sacred symbols. The religious system is not discerned through such symbols at all. Knowledge of the conditions of life is im­parted principally through description of the commonplace facts of life, which sym­bolize, stand for, nothing beyond themselves and their consequences, for example, for the clean and the unclean or liability on and exemption from liability. That description is effected through the construction of units of meaning, intermediate divisions composed of cognitive elements. All is balanced, explicit in detail, but reticent about the whole; balanced in detail but dumb about the character of the balance. What is not said is what is eloquent and compelling as much as what is said. Accordingly, that simple and fundamental congruence between ethos and world view is to begin with, for the Mishnah, the very language by which the one is given cognitive expression in the other. The medium of patterned speech conveys the meaning of what is said.

System: The Mishnah’s Principal Topics.

The Mishnah as a Statement of a World View

By “Judaism” I mean a world view and way of life formed by a group of people who regard themselves, and are properly regarded by others, as Israelites, in which the life of the group is both defined and explained within the framework of Israel’s holiness. By this definition, there have been diverse forms or kinds of Judaism. But from the time of the Mishnah onward, most of these kinds have referred not only to Scripture but also to the Mishnah and its companions, the two Taimuds and cognate writings. So these diverse kinds have formed exemplifications of a single, fundamental kind of Judaism. If, therefore, we wish to make sense of nearly all religious expressions of “being Jewish” and nearly all types of Judaism from the second century to the twentieth, we must begin with the Mishnah (though, ob­viously, we must not end there).

Now the Judaism shaped by the Mishnah consists of a coherent world view and comprehensive way of living. It is a world view which speaks of transcendent things, a way of life in response to the supernatural meaning of what is done, a heightened and deepened perception of the sanctification of Israel in deed and in deliberation. Sanctification means two things: first, distinguishing Israel in all its dimensions from the world in all its ways; second, establishing the stability, order, regularity, pre­dictability, and reliability of Israel at moments and in contexts of danger. Danger means instability, disorder, irregularity, uncertainty, and betrayal. Each topic of the system as a whole takes up a critical and indispensable moment or context of social being. Each orders what is disorderly and dangerous. Through what is said in regard to each of the Mishnah’s principal topics, what the system as a whole wishes to declare is fully expressed. Yet if the parts severally and jointly give the message of the whole, the whole cannot exist without all of the parts, so well joined and carefully crafted are they all.

Let me now describe and briefly interpret the six components of the Mishnah’s system. The critical issue in the economic life, which means, in farming, is in two parts, revealed in the first division. First, Israel, as tenant on God’s holy Land, maintains the property in the ways God requires, keeping the rules which mark the Land and its crops as holy. Next, the hour at which the sanctification of the Land comes to form a critical mass, namely, in the ripened crops, is the moment pon­derous with danger and heightened holiness. Israel’s will so affects the crops as to mark a part of them as holy, the rest of them as available for common use. The human will is determinative in the process of sanctification.

Second, in the second division, what happens in the Land at certain times, at Appointed Times, marks off spaces of the Land as holy in yet another way. The center of the Land and the focus of its sanctification is the Temple. There the produce of the Land is received and given back to God, the one who created and sanctified the Land. At these unusual moments of sanctification, the inhabitants of the Land in their social being in villages enter a state of spatial sanctification. That is to say, the village boundaries mark off holy space, within which one must remain during the holy time. This is expressed in two ways. First, the Temple itself observes and expresses the special, recurring holy time. Second, the villages of the Land are brought into alignment with the Temple, forming a complement and completion to the Temple’s sacred being. The advent of the Appointed Times precipitates a spatial reordering of the Land, so that the boundaries of the sacred are matched and mirrored in village and in Temple. In the heightened holiness marked by these moments of Appointed Times, therefore, the occasion for sanctification is worked out. Like the harvest, the advent of an appointed time, a pilgrim festival, also a sacred season, is made to express that regular, orderly, and predictable sort of sanctification for Israel which the system as a whole seeks.

If for a moment we now leap over the third and fourth divisions, we come to the counterparts of the divisions of Agriculture and Appointed Times. These are the fifth and sixth divisions, namely Holy Things and Purities, those which deal with the everyday and the ordinary, as against the special moments of harvest, on the one side, and special time or season, on the other.

The fifth division is about the Temple on ordinary days. The Temple, the locus of sanctification, is conducted in a wholly routine and trustworthy, punctilious man­ner. The one thing which may unsettle matters is the intention and will of the human actor. This is subjected to carefully prescribed limitations and remedies. The divi­sion of Holy Things generates its companion, the sixth division, the one on cultic cleanness, Purities. The relationship between the two is like that between Agricul­ture and Appointed Times, the former locative, tha latter utopian, the former dealing with the fields, the latter with the interplay between fields and altar.

Here too, in the sixth division, once we speak of the one place of the Temple, we address, too, the cleanness which pertains to every place. A system of cleanness, taking into account what imparts uncleanness and how this is done, what is subject to uncleanness, and how that state is overcome—that system is fully expressed, once more, in response to the participation of the human will. Without the wish and act of a human being, the system does not function. It is inert. Sources of uncleanness, which come naturally and not by volition, and modes of purification, which work naturally, and not by human intervention, remain inert until human will has imparted susceptibility to uncleanness, that is, introduced into the system, that food and drink, bed, pot, chair, and pan, which to begin with form the focus of the system. The movement from sanctification to uncleanness takes place when human will and work precipitate it.

This now brings us back to the middle divisions, the third and fourth, on Women and Damages. They take their place in the structure of the whole by showing the congruence, within the larger framework of regularity and order, of human concerns of family and farm, politics and workaday transactions among ordinary people. For without attending to these matters, the Mishnah’s system does not encompass what, at its foundations, it is meant to comprehend and order. So what is at issue is fully cogent with the rest.

In the case of Women, the third division, attention focuses upon the point of disorder marked by the transfer of that disordering anomaly, woman, from the regular status provided by one man, to the equally trustworthy status provided by another. That is the point at which the Mishnah’s interests are aroused: once more, predictably, the moment of disorder.

In the case of Damages, the fourth division, there are two important concerns. First, there is the paramount interest in preventing, so far as possible, the disorderly rise of one person and fall of another, and in sustaining the status quo of the economy, the house and household, of Israel, the holy society in eternal stasis. Second, there is the necessary concomitant in the provision of a system of political institutions to carry out the laws which preserve the balance and steady state of persons.

The two divisions which take up topics of concrete and material concern, the formation and dissolution of families and the transfer of property in that connection, the transactions, both through torts and through commerce, which lead to exchanges of property and the potential dislocation of the state of families in society, are both locative and utopian. They deal with the concrete locations in which people make their lives, household and street and field, the sexual and commercial exchanges of a given village. But they pertain to the life of all Israel, both in the Land and otherwise. These two divisions, together with the household ones of Appointed Times, constitute the sole opening outward toward the life of utopian Israel, that diaspora in the far reaches of the ancient world, in the endless span of time. This utopian community from the Mishnah’s perspective is not only in exile but unac­counted for, outside the system, for the Mishnah declines to recognize and take it into account. Israelites who dwell in the land of (unclean) death instead of in the Land simply fall outside of the range of (holy) life. Priests, who must remain cultically clean, may not leave the Land—and neither may most of the Mishnah.

Now if we ask ourselves about the sponsorship and source of special interest in the topics just reviewed, we shall come up with obvious answers.

So far as the Mishnah is a document about the holiness of Israel in its Land, it expresses that conception of sanctification and theory of its modes which will have been shaped among those to whom the Temple and its technology of joining Heaven and holy Land through the sacred place defined the core of being, I mean, the caste of the priests.

So far as the Mishnah takes up the way in which transactions are conducted among ordinary folk and takes the position that it is through documents that trans­actions are embodied and expressed (surely the position of the relevant tractates an both Women and Damages), the Mishnah expresses what is self-evident to ‘.Tibes. Just as, to the priest, there is a correspondence between the table of the Lord in the Temple and the locus of the divinity in the heavens, so, to the scribe, there is a correspondence between the documentary expression of the human will :> earth, in writs of all sorts, in the orderly provision of courts for the predictable t c ust disposition of exchanges of persons and property, and Heaven’s judgment on these same matters. When a woman becomes sanctified to a particular man on earth, through the appropriate document governing the transfer of her person and property, in heaven as well, the woman is deemed truly sanctified to that man. A violation of the writ therefore is not merely a crime. It is a sin. That is why the Temple rite involving the wife accused of adultery is integral to the system of the division of Women. So there are scribal divisions, the third and fourth, and priestly divisions, the first, fifth, and sixth; the second is then shared.

These two social groups, the priestly caste and the scribal profession, are not categorically symmetrical. But for both groups the Mishnah makes self-evident statements. We know, moreover, that in time to come, the scribal profession would become a focus of sanctification. The scribe would be transformed into the “rabbi,” honored man par excellence, locus of the holy through what he knew, just as the priest had been and would remain locus of the holy through what he could claim for genealogy. The divisions of special interest to scribes-become-rabbis and to their governance of Israelite society, those of Women and Damages, together with certain others particularly relevant to utopian Israel beyond the system of the Land—those tractates would grow and grow. Many, though not all, of the others would remain essentially as they were with the closure of the Mishnah. So we must notice that the Mishnah, for its part, speaks for the program of topics important to the priests. It takes up the persona of the scribes, speaking through their voice and in their manner.

At this point much has been said about priests in general. The reader familiar with the New Testament will wonder about a particular type of priest or lay person pretending to be a priest, namely, the Pharisee. Two matters require some attention. First, we want to ask what we learn about the Pharisees from the Mishnah. Second, we inquire about the relationship of the Pharisees to the Mishnah. As to the Phar­isees as a group in the various groups of pietists in Judaism before a.d. 70, there are diverse references, difficult to square with one another. The one set of references pertinent to the materials before us is those in the Gospels, in which the Pharisees are represented as a group which emphasized certain (“external”) religious prac­tices, involving distinctive views on the resurrection of the dead, on strict observance of the Sabbath, and on careful tithing of agricultural produce and eating food in a state of purity generally associated only with the Temple cult. Now so far as the Mishnah takes for granted that Jews must strictly observe the Sabbath in a certain way, carefully tithe the agricultural produce they eat, and preserve a state of cultic or Levitical cleanness (that is, observe the curious taboos of Leviticus Chapters Eleven through Fifteen when eating their food at home, not merely meat deriving from animals barbecued in the Temple), it certainly accords with views attributed to Pharisees. On the other hand, the Mishnah rarely refers to the Pharisees. When it does, it does not represent them as its definitive authorities. Sages, not Pharisees, are the Mishnah’s authorities. A few of the Mishnah’s authorities, particularly Gamaliel and Simeon b. Gamaliel, are known from independent sources to have been Pharisees; Paul tells us about Gamaliel, and Josephus about Simeon b. Gam­aliel. But that is the sum and substance of it. Consequently, to assign the whole of the Mishnah to the Pharisees who flourished before a.d. 70 and who are known to us from diverse sources, all of them composed in the form in which we know them after a.d. 70, is hardly justified. We learn little about the Pharisees from the Mish­nah, except in the handful of sayings referring to them (Hag. 2:47; Sot. 3:4; Ton. 4:12; and Yad. 4:6-8), or assigned to people who we have good reason to believe were Pharisees.

As to the relationship of the Pharisees to the Mishnah, we learn somewhat more. For the Mishnah contains a great many principles and propositions which can be shown to go back to the period before a.d. 70. Some of the most striking and important of these principles, those in the divisions on Agriculture and Purities in particular, but also a few in the divisions on Appointed Times and Women, may be shown to serve sectarian, and not general or societal, interests. It would carry us far afield to specify what these propositions are and why they evidently speak out of a sectarian context. The main point should not be missed. When we speak about the Pharisees, we speak about Jews who thought among other things that when they ate their meals at home, they should do so in the way, in general, in which the priests eat their meals of meat, meal, and wine, supplied from the left­overs of God’s meal on the altar of the Temple in Jerusalem. So some of them were priests who pretended that their homes were little Temples. And, it seems reasonable to suppose, others of them were lay people pretending to be priests and engaged in the same fantasy. When in these pages we speak of priests, these are the particular priests whose viewpoint will be expressed in those parts of the doc­ument which lay stress upon eating at home as if one is in the Temple.

But this too requires qualification. First, Pharisees were not the only Jews who had a special interest in the cultic cleanness of their food. The Essene community at Qumram also maintained that its food was in a state of cultic cleanness, as if it were prepared on the altar of God in the holy Temple. Consequently, we cannot take for granted that when a saying indicates the conviction that ordinary food must be kept pure as if it were the Lord’s food in the Temple, that saying must derive from a Pharisee and from no other sect, group, or source. That simply is not so.

Second, there are many other parts of the document in which interests of all priests are at hand. For instance, there is the whole of the fifth division, Holy Things. In vast stretches of the first division, Agriculture, in which the separation :f tithes and heave offering as the priestly ration is described, all priests are equally represented. No one had to be a Pharisee in particular to take up these matters. .Any priest who cared about his income (either at the present time or in the time in which the Mishnah’s law would everywhere prevail) would take these same mat­ters to heart. So the Mishnah is very much a priestly document. It may also be a document reflecting in some measure the partisan interests of a certain kind of Tests (and associated lay people). But it cannot be called a document only or nainly of this second group. Its social constituency, as I said, included a large : :aort of priests interested in their income and emoluments. Some of these may ■e -e regarded as important those special matters stressed in parts of the sixth . :sion. but all of them will have cared about the laws of the first, second, fifth, nJ the bulk of the sixth divisions as well.

This brief statement of the substance of the Mishnah’s system and the evident caste and professional sponsorship of the Mishnah once more brings us to the question of how people in our own time may profitably consult the contents of this document from long ago and far away. The sages of the late first and second cen­turies produced a document to contain the most important things they could specify, they chose as their subjects six matters, of which, I am inclined to think, for the same purpose we should have rejected at least four, and probably all six. That is, four of the divisions of the Mishnah are devoted to purity law, tithing, laws for the conduct of sacrifice in the Temple cult, and the way in which the sacrifices are carried out at festivals—four areas of reality which, I suspect, would not have found a high place on a list of our own most fundamental concerns. The other two divi­sions, which deal with the transfer of women from one man to another and with matters of civil law—including the organization of the government, civil claims, torts, and damages, real estate and the like—complete the list. When we attempt to interpret the sort of world the rabbis of the Mishnah propose to create, at the very outset we realize that that world in no way conforms, in its most profound and definitive categories of organization, to our own. It follows that the critical work of making sense and use of the Mishnah is to learn how to hear what the Mishnah wishes to say in its own setting and to the people addressed by those who made it up. For that purpose it is altogether too easy to bring our questions and take for granted that, when the sages seem to say something relevant to our questions, they therefore propose to speak to us. Anachronism takes many forms. The most dan­gerous appears when an ancient text seems readily accessible and immediately clear.

For the Mishnah is separated from us by the whole of western history, philosophy, and science. Its wise sayings, its law, and its theology may lie in the background of the law and lore of contemporary Judaism. But they have been mediated to us by many centuries of exegesis, not to mention experience. They come to us now in the form which theologians and scholars have imposed upon them. It follows that the critical problem is to recognize the distance between us and the Mishnah. Our task is to allow strange people to speak in a strange language about things quite alien to us, and yet learn how to hear what they are saying. That is, we have to learn how to understand them in their language and in their terms. Once we recognize that they are fundamentally different from us, we have also to lay claim to them, or, rather, acknowledge their claim upon us.

As I shall argue at the end, what makes the Mishnah important is that it supplies us with another, particularly full and well-organized, corpus of e.g.’s, that is, ex­amples of how people did one thing and not some other, problems for interpretation, by one theory or another, of why people did one thing and not some other. The Mishnah captures a whole vision of a complete world. It describes the house and household of Israel, an architect’s plan in tedious detail, as useful plans must be. Because the Mishnah does not generalize, it allows us to look for what is general in all of its particularities. Because of its tiresome babble about details, the Mishnah permits us to try and test our theories of the whole. But in saying so, I have moved beyond my story. Let us now turn to another side of context, not the one of syn­chronic history, nor the one of language and culture, but the Mishnah’s diachronic setting in Israelite revelation: the Mishnah and God’s word in the revelation of the Torah to Moses at Mount Sinai.

Heritage: Mishnah and Scripture. The Open Canon of Judaism

To this point in the discussion, the reader must imagine that the Mishnah falls into the category of documents found in a desert cave, produced by a nascent group with no past at all, a document like the Pentateuch, addressed to a mixed multitude of a no-people. For up to now I have introduced the Mishnah as if it stood only at the head of a long line of Israelite religion and law, not at the end of one. That, of course, is not so. Every significant creation in ancient Israel from the formation of the Hebrew Scriptures and conclusion of the canon onward necessarily forms a response to the Torah. This Torah is the revelation of God to Moses on Mount Sinai, contained in the Pentateuch, as well as the other biblical books, known to Israel all together as Tanakh (for Torah, Nebiim, Ketubim, that is, Torah, prophets, writings), and to Christendom as the Old Testament. For each such fresh creation is inevitably a reworking of available materials of revelation. Each, therefore, either claims for itself a place within the canon defined by the Israelite Scriptures. Or it deliberately excludes itself and seeks a place outside of, but in relationship to, that same canon. Consequently, at the end of this introduction to the document before us, we have to ask about the relationship between the Mishnah and the Holy Scriptures which define and frame the Israelite world—world view, way of life—to which the framers of the Mishnah addressed themselves and within which they too took shape.

On the surface, Scripture plays little role in the Mishnaic system. The Mishnah rarely cites a verse of Scripture, refers to Scripture as an entity, links its own ideas to those of Scripture, or lays claim to originate in what Scripture has said, even by indirect or remote allusion to a Scriptural verse of teaching. So, superficially, the Mishnah is totally indifferent to Scripture. That impression, moreover, is reinforced by the traits of the language of the Mishnah. The framers of the Mishnaic discourse, amazingly, never attempt to imitate the language of Scripture, as do those of the Essene writings at Qumram. The very redactional structure of Scripture, found too serviceable to the writer of the Temple scroll, remarkably, is of no interest whatever to the organizers of the Mishnah and its tractates, except in a very few cases Leviticus 16; Yoma; Exodus 12; Pesahim).

I wish now to dwell on these facts. Formally, redactionally, and linguistically the Mishnah stands in splendid isolation from Scripture. It is not possible to point to many parallels, that is, cases of anonymous books, received as holy, in which the forms and formulations (specific verses) of Scripture play so slight a role. People -ho wrote holy books commonly imitated the Scripture’s language. They cited concrete verses. They claimed at the very least that direct revelation had come to Mem. as in the angelic discourses of IV Ezra and Baruch, so that what they say u;nds on an equal plane with Scripture. The internal evidence of the Mishnah’s •Aty-two usable tractates (excluding Abot), by contrast, in no way suggests that -” •one pretended to talk like Moses and write like Moses, claimed to cite and correctly interpret things that Moses had said, or even alleged to have had a rev- ; ction like that of Moses and so to stand on the mountain with Moses. There is * Me of this. So the claim of Scriptural authority for the Mishnah’s doctrines and -restitutions is difficult to locate within the internal evidence of the Mishnah itself.

We cannot be surprised that, in consequence of this amazing position of auton­omous, autocephalic authority implicit in the character of Mishnaic discourse, the Mishnah should forthwith have demanded in its own behalf some sort of apologetic. Nor are we surprised that the Mishnah attracted its share of quite hostile criticism. The issue, in the third century, would be this: Why should we listen to this mostly anonymous document, which makes statements on the nature of institutions and social conduct, statements we obviously are expected to keep? Who are Meir, Yose, Judah, Simeon, and Eleazar—people who from the perspective of the third-century recipients of the document, lived fifty or a hundred years ago—that we should listen to what they have to say? God revealed the Torah. Is this Mishnah too part of the Torah? If so, how? What, in other words, is the relationship of the Mishnah to Scripture, and how does the Mishnah claim authority over us such as we accord to the revelation to Moses by God on Mount Sinai? There are two important responses to the question of the place of Scripture in the Mishnaic tradition.

First and most radical: the Mishnah constitutes torah. It too is a statement of revelation, “Torah revealed to Moses at Sinai.” But this part of revelation has come down in a form different from the well-known, written part, the Scripture. This tradition truly deserves the name “tradition,” because for a long time it was handed down orally, not in writing, until given the written formulation now before us in the Mishnah. This sort of apologetic for the Mishnah appears, to begin with, in Abot, with its stunning opening chapter, linking Moses on Sinai through the ages to the earliest-named authorities of the Mishnah itself, the five pairs, on down to Shammai and Hillel. Since some of the named authorities in the chain of tradition appear throughout the materials of the Mishnah, the claim is that what these people say comes to them from Sinai through the processes of qabbalah and massoret— handing down, “traditioning.”

So the reason (from the perspective of the Torah-myth of the Mishnah) that the Mishnah does not cite Scripture is that it does not have to. It stands on the same plane as Scripture. It enjoys the same authority as Scripture. This radical position is still more extreme than that taken by pseudepigraphic writers, who imitate the style of Scripture, or who claim to speak within that same gift of revelation as Moses. It is one thing to say one’s holy book is Scripture because it is like Scripture, or to claim that the author of the holy book has a revelation independent of that of Moses. These two positions concede to the Torah of Moses priority over their own holy books. The Mishnah’s apologists make no such concession, when they allege that the Mishnah is part of the Torah of Moses. They appeal to the highest possible authority to the Israelite framework, claiming the most one can claim in behalf of the book which, in fact, bears the names of men who lived fifty years before the apologists themselves. That seems to me remarkable courage.

Then there is this matter of the Mishnah’s not citing Scripture. When we consider the rich corpus of allusions to Scripture in other holy books, both those bearing the names of authors and those presented anonymously, we realize that the Mishnah claims its authority to be coequal with that of Scripture. Many other holy books are made to lay claim to authority only because they depend upon the authority of Scripture and state the true meaning of Scripture. That fact brings us to the second answer to the question of the place of Scripture in the Mishnaic tradition.

The earliest exegetical strata of the two Taimuds and the legal-exegetical writings produced in the two hundred years after the closure of the Mishnah take the position that the Mishnah is wholly dependent upon Scripture. Whatever is of worth in the Mishnah can be shown to derive directly from Scripture. So the Mishnah—“tra­dition”—is deemed distinct from, and subordinate to, Scripture. This position is expressed in an obvious way. Once the Taimuds cite a Mishnah-pericope, they commonly ask, “What is the source of these words?” And the answer invariably is, “As it is said in Scripture.” This constitutes not simply a powerful defense for the revealed truth of the Mishnah. For when the exegetes find themselves con­strained to add proof texts, they admit the need to improve and correct an existing flaw.

That the search for the Scriptural bases for the Mishnah’s laws constitutes both an apologetic and a criticism is shown in the character of a correlative response to the Mishnah, namely, the Sifra and its exegesis of Leviticus. The Sifra is a com­mentary on the Book of Leviticus, citing the same authorities as appear in the Mishnah itself. But the fundamental structure of the Sifra derives from the period after the Mishnah had taken shape, since the Sifra is a polemical document. The polemic is against the failure of the Mishnah to cite Scripture frequently or system­atically to link its ideas to Scripture through the medium of formal demonstration by exegesis. This polemic is expressed over and over again. The Sifra’s rhetorical exegesis follows a standard syntactical-redactional form. Scripture will be cited. Then a statement will be made about its meaning, or a statement of law correlative to that Scripture will be given. Commonly, that statement cites the Mishnah, often verbatim. Finally, the author of Sifra invariably states, Now is that not (merely) logical? And the point of that statement will be, Can this position not be gained through the working of mere logic, based upon facts supplied (to be sure) by Scripture? The polemical power of Sifra lies in its repetitive demonstration that the stated position, citation of a Mishnah pericope, is not only not the product of logic, but is, and can be only, the product of exegesis of Scripture.

What is still more to the point, is that exegesis in Sifra’s and the Talmud’s view is formal in its character. That is, it is based upon some established mode of exegesis of the formal traits of Scriptural grammar and syntax, assigned to the remote an­tiquity represented by the names of Ishmael or Aqiba. So the polemic of Sifra and the Taimuds is against the position that, first, what the Mishnah says (in the Mish- nah’s own words) is merely logical; and that, second, the position taken by the Mishnah can have been reached in any way other than through grammatical-syn- lictical exegesis of Scripture. That other way, the way of reading the Scripture •.Trough philosophical logic or practical reason, is explicitly rejected time and again. Philosophical logic and applied reason are inadequate. Formal exegesis is shown to *e not only adequate but necessary, indeed inexorable. It follows that Sifra under- _

So, there are two positions which would rapidly take shape when the Mishnah was published.

First, tradition in the form of the Mishnah is deemed autonomous of Scripture and enjoys the same authority as that of Scripture. The reason is that Scripture and (“oral”) tradition are merely two media for conveying a single corpus of re­vealed law and doctrine.

Second, tradition in the form of the Mishnah is true because it is not autonomous of Scripture. Tradition is secondary and dependent upon Scripture.

The authority of the Mishnah is the authority of Moses. That authority comes to the Mishnah directly and in an unmediated way, because the Mishnah’s words were said by God to Moses on Mount Sinai and faithfully transmitted through a process of oral formulation and oral transmission from that time until those words were written down by Judah the Patriarch at the end of the second century.

Or, that authority comes to the Mishnah indirectly, in a way mediated through the written Scriptures.

What the Mishnah says is what the Scripture says, rightly interpreted. The au­thority of tradition lies in its correct interpretation of the Scripture. Tradition bears no autonomous authority, is not an independent entity, and correlative with Scrip­ture. A very elaborate (and insufferably dull) technology of exegesis of grammar and syntax is needed to build the bridge between tradition as contained in the Mishnah and Scripture, the original utensil shaped by God and revealed to Moses to convey the truth of revelation to the community of Israel.

Or matters are otherwise. I hardly need to make them explicit.

Let me now state the facts of the relationship of the Mishnah to Scripture, beyond the picture of the third-century apologist-critics of the Mishnah.

First, there are tractates which simply repeat in their own words precisely what Scripture has to say, and at best serve to amplify and complete the basic ideas of Scripture. For example, all of the cultic tractates of the second division, the one on Appointed Times, which tell what one is supposed to do in the Temple on the various special days of the year, and the bulk of the cultic tractates of the fifth division, which deals with Holy Things, simply restate facts of Scripture. For an­other example, all of those tractates of the sixth division, on Purities, which specify sources of uncleanness, depend completely on information supplied by Scripture. I have demonstrated in detail that every important statement in Niddah, on menstrual uncleanness, and the most fundamental notions of Zabim, on the uncleanness of the person with flux referred to in Leviticus Chapter Fifteen, as well as every detail in Negaim, on the uncleanness of the person or house suffering the uncleanness described at Leviticus Chapters Thirteen and Fourteen—all of these tractates serve only to restate the basic facts of Scripture and to complement those facts with other important ones.

There are, second, tractates which take up facts of Scripture but work them out in a way in which those Scriptural facts cannot have led us to predict. A supposition concerning what is important about the facts, utterly remote from the supposition of Scripture, will explain why the Mishnah tractates under discussion say the original things they say in confronting those Scripturally provided facts. For one example, Scripture takes for granted that the red cow will be burned in a state of uncleanness, because it is burned outside the camp—Temple. The priestly writers cannot have imagined that a state of cultic cleanness was to be attained outside of the cult. The absolute datum of tractate Parah, by contrast, is that cultic cleanness not only can be attained outside of the ‘tent of meeting.’ The red cow was to be burned in a state of cleanness even exceeding that cultic cleanness required in the Temple itself. The problematic which generates the intellectual agendum of Parah, therefore, is how to work out the conduct of the rite of burning the cow in relationship to the Temple: Is it to be done in exactly the same way, or in exactly the opposite way? This mode of contrastive and analogical thinking helps us to understand the gen­erative problematic of such tractates as Erubin and Besah from the second division, to mention only two.

Third, there are, predictably, many tractates which either take up problems in no way suggested by Scripture, or begin from facts at best merely relevant to facts of Scripture. In the former category are Tohorot, on the cleanness of foods, with its companion, Uqsin; Demai, on doubtfully tithed produce; Tamid, on the conduct of the daily whole offering; Baba Batra, on rules of real estate transactions and certain other commercial and property relationships; and so on. In the latter cat­egory are Ohalot, which spins out its strange problems within the theory that a tent and a utensil are to be compared to one another (!); Kelim, on the susceptibility io uncleanness of various sorts of utensils; Miqvaot, on the sorts of water which effect purification from uncleanness; Ketubot and Gittin, on the documents of marriage and divorce; and many others. These tractates draw on facts of Scripture. But the problem confronted in these tractates in no way responds to problems important to Scripture. What we have here is a prior program of inquiry, which .’.I make ample provision for facts of Scripture in an inquiry, to begin with, gen­erated essentially outside the framework of Scripture. First comes the problem or Topic, then, if possible, comes attention to Scripture.

So there we have it: some tractates merely repeat what we find in Scripture. Some are totally independent of Scripture. And some fall in between. Clearly, we ire no closer to a definitive answer to the question of the relationship of Scripture : ? the Mishnah than we were when we described the state of thought on the very same questions in the third and fourth centuries. We find everything and its op- : tsite. But to offer a final answer to the question of Scripture-Mishnah relation- shtps. we have to take that fact seriously. The Mishnah in no way is so remote from Scripture as its formal omission of citations of verses of Scripture suggests. In no r. can it be described as contingent upon, and secondary to Scripture, as many of its third-century apologists claimed. But the right answer is not that it is somewhere in between. Scripture confronts the framers of the Mishnah as revelation, not merely as a source of facts. But the framers of the Mishnah had their own world with which to deal. They made statements in the framework and fellowship of their own age and generation. They were bound, therefore, to come to Scripture with a set of questions generated other than in Scripture. They brought their own ideas about what was going to be important in Scripture. This is perfectly natural.

The philosophers of the Mishnah conceded to Scripture the highest authority. At the sime time what they chose to hear, within the authoritative statements of Scripture, would in the end form a statement of its own. To state matters simply: all of Scripture is authoritative. But only some of Scripture is relevant. And what hap­pened is that the framers and philosophers of the tradition of the Mishnah came to Scripture when they had reason to. That is to say, they brought to Scripture a program of questions and inquiries framed essentially among themselves. So they were highly selective. That is why their program itself constituted a statement upon the meaning of Scripture. They and their apologists of one sort hastened to add, their program consisted of a statement of and upon the meaning of Scripture.

In part, we must affirm the truth of that claim. When the framers of the Mishnah speak about the priestly passages of the Mosaic law codes, with deep insight they perceive profound layers of meaning embedded (“to begin with”) in those codes. What they have done with the Priestly Code (P), moreover, they also have done, though I think less coherently, with the bulk of the Deuteronomic laws and with some of those of the Covenant Code. But their exegetical triumph—exegetical, not merely eisegetical—lies in their handling of the complex corpus of materials of the Priestly Code.

True, others will have selected totally different passages of Scripture, not in the Mosaic codes to begin with. Prophecy makes its impact on the holy books of other Israelites of the same ancient times, as, for instance, Q. Matthew, and Mark. Surely we must concede that, in reading those passages, other writers, interested in history and salvation, displayed that same perspicacity as did the framers of the Mishnaic tradition who interpreted the priestly code as they did and so formed a theory of Israel’s sanctification. It is in the nature of Scripture itself that such should be the case. The same Scripture which gives us the prophets gives us the Pentateuch as well—and gives priority to the Pentateuchal codes as the revelation of God to Moses.

Now to the Mishnah: What to Seek

In introducing the reader to the Mishnah, I wish to make possible a protracted acquaintance, a long friendship, even though, as I have stressed, it is between people essentially and profoundly alien to one another. What joins the ages is not only our interest in their world.

First, it also is our interest in any encompassing and important statement of how humankind might in imagination create a world. The Mishnah is a specimen of Utopia. That is why what we find in the Mishnah is more than insight into the world created within one kind of Judaism in the formative centuries of our own Western civilization.

Second, in the Mishnah contemporary humanists may gain a more ample account of a tiny part of the potentialities of humanity: that part expressed within the Judaic tradition in its rabbinical formulation. When we find out what it is that the Mishnaic system contains within itself, we discover yet another mode for the measure of humankind. The human potentialities and available choices within one ecological frame of humanity, the ancient Jewish one, are defined and explored by the sages. The same question—the possibilities contained within the culture of ancient Ju­daism—is to be addressed to the diverse formations and structures, at other times in its history besides that of late antiquity. But we have to learn how to do the work in some one place, and only then shall we have a call to attempt it elsewhere. What we must do is first describe, then interpret.

But what do we wish to describe? I am inclined to think the task is to encompass everything deemed important by some one group, to include within, and to exclude from, its holy book, its definitive text. We wish to make sense of a system and its exclusions, its stance in a taxonomy of systems. For, on the surface, what sages put in they think essential, and what they omit they do not think important. If that is self-evident, then the affirmative choices are the ones requiring description and then interpretation. But what standpoint will permit us to fasten onto the whole, and where is the fulcrum on which to place our lever? For, given the size of the evidence, the work of description may leave us with an immense, and essentially pointless, task of repetition: saying in our own words what the sources say, perfectly clearly, in theirs.

So when I say that a large part of work is to describe the world view of the sages of the Mishnah, at best I acquire a license to hunt for insight. What defines the work as well as I am able, is what has run through this introduction to the Mishnah: the idea of a system. That is, a whole set of interrelated concerns and conceptions which, all together, both express a world view and define a way of living for a particular group of people in a particular economic and political setting. The Mish­nah brings to the surface the integrated conception of the world and of the way in which the people should live in that world. All in all, that system both defines and forms reality for Jews responsive to the sages of the Mishnah.

Now, self-evidently, all worth knowing about the sages and the Jews around them is not contained within their system, that is, the Mishnah, as they lay it out. There is, after all, the hard fact that the Jews did not have power fully to shape the world within which they lived out their lives and formed their social group. No one else did either. There were, indeed, certain persistent and immutable facts which form the natural environment, the material ecology for their system. These facts do not change but do have to be confronted. There are, for instance, the twin facts of Jewish powerlessness and minority status. Any system produced by Judaism for nearly the whole of its history will have to take account of the fact that the group is of no account in the world, a pariah-people. Another definitive fact is the ante­cedent heritage of Scripture and associated tradition, which define for the Jews a considerably more important role in the supernatural world than the natural world obviously affords them. Israel is God’s first love, not Rome’s last victim. These two facts, the Jews’ numerical insignificance and political unimportance and the Jews’ inherited pretensions and fantasies about their own centrality in the history and destiny of the human race, created (and still create) a certain dissonance between any given Jewish world view, on the one side, and the world to be viewed by the Jews, on the other. And so is the case for the Mishnah.

But we cannot take for granted that what we think should define the central tension of a given system in fact is what concerns the people who created and expressed that system. If we have no way of showing that our surmise may be wrong, then we also have no basis on which to verify our thesis as to the core and meaning of the system before us. The result can be at best good guesses. A mode for interpreting the issues of a system has therefore to be proposed.

One route to the interpretation of a system is to specify the sorts of issues it chooses to regard as problems, the matters it chooses for its close and continuing exegesis, our exegesis of the canon of topics. When we know the things about which people worry, we have some insight into the way in which they see the world. So, when we approach the Mishnah, we ask about its critical tensions, the recurring issues which occupy its great minds. It is out of concern with this range of issues, and not some other, that the Mishnah defines its principal areas for discussion. Here is the point at which the great exercises of law and theology will be generated— here and not somewhere else. This is a way in which we specify the choices people have made, the selections a system has effected. When we know what people have chosen, we also may speculate about the things they have rejected, the issues they regard as uninteresting or as closed. We then may describe the realm of thought and everyday life which they do not deem subject to tension and speculation. It is these two sides to this vast document—the things people conceive to be dangerous and important, the things they set into the background as unimportant and unin­teresting—which provide us with a key to the culture of community or, as I prefer to put it, to the system constructed and expressed by a given social group. That is the sort of information and insight available in the pages of this book, but only if you look for it. Let Tarfon speak to the reader: Yours is not to complete the work. Yours is not to abandon it either.

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The Generation of Collapse

 

 

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