Mishnah Is a Written Translation

¶ … Mishnah is a written translation of the oral law of the Old Testament and of the political and civil laws of the Jews (Porton, 1982). The Mishnah is important in Rabbinic literature for its depiction of a religious universe where the Temple in Jerusalem, destroyed nearly a century earlier, still retains a central place. Laws concerning the Temple service constitute one of the Mishnah's six divisions.

Rabbinical Judaism believes that the Five Books of Moses called the Torah have always been transmitted in parallel with an oral tradition. Two guides to laws were given to Moses at Mount Sinai. The first is composed of the Five Books of Moses; Genesis through Deuteronomy. These five books make up the Hebrew Bible. When the writings of the Prophets are added to the Torah, the expanded volume is called the Tanakh. The Tanakh is the complete version of Hebrew Literature that Christianity knows as the Old Testament. The second law given to Moses at Sinai is the description of the Written Law as relayed by the scholarly and other religious leaders of each generation. This Oral Law is considered the more authoritative of the two. The traditions of the Oral Law are considered as the basis for the interpretation, and often for the reading, of the Written Law (Fraade, 1990).

By 200 AD, much of the Oral Law was edited together into the Mishnah (Zlotnick, 1988). Over the next four centuries, this material underwent analysis and debate in the world's major Jewish communities. These eventually came to be edited together into compilations known as the Talmud. Jewish law and custom is not based on a literal reading of the Torah, or the rest of the Tanakh, but on the combined oral and written tradition.

Prior to the time of Rabbi, Jewish Law was transmitted orally. It was forbidden to write and publish the Oral Law because any writing would be incomplete and subject to misinterpretation and abuse. However, after much debate, this restriction was lifted when it became apparent that it was the only way to ensure that the law could be preserved.

The Mishna consists of six orders, or sedarim (Zlotnick, 1988). Each of the orders contains between 7 and 12 tractates, called masechtot. Each masechet is divided into smaller units called mishnayot. The six orders are described below:

First Order: Zeraim ("Seeds") is made up of 11 tractates and deals with agricultural laws and prayers.

Second Order: Moed ("Festival Days") is made up of 12 tractates and pertains to the laws of the Sabbath and the Festivals.

Third Order: Nashim ("Women") is made up of 7 tractates and deals with marriage and divorce.

Fourth Order: Nezikin ("Damages") is made up of 10 tractates and deals with civil and criminal law.

Fifth Order: Kodshim ("Holy things") is made up of11 tractates and involves sacrificial rites, the Temple, and the dietary laws.

Sixth order: Tohorot ("Purity") is made up of 12 tractates and pertains to ritual and the laws of family purity.

The Mishnah was and still is traditionally studied through recitation. Many medieval manuscripts of the Mishnah are vowelized, and some of these contain partial Tiberian cantillation. Most vowelized editions of the Mishnah today reflect standard Ashkenazic vowelization, and often contain mistakes. The Albeck edition of the Mishnah was vowelized by Hannokh Yellin, who made eclectic use of both medieval manuscripts and current oral traditions of pronunciation from Jewish communities all over the world. The Albeck edition includes an entire volume by Yellin detailing his eclectic method.

Two institutes at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem have collected major oral archives which hold extensive recordings of Jews chanting the Mishnah using a variety of melodies and many different kinds of pronunciation. These institutes are the Jewish Oral Traditions Research Center and the National Voice Archives. Both the Mishnah and Talmud contain little serious biographical studies of the people discussed therein, and the same tractate will conflate the points-of-view of many different people. However, sketchy biographies of the Mishaic sages can often be constructed with historical detail from Talmudic and Midrashic sources.

Many modern historical scholars have focused on the timing and the formation the Mishnah. A vital question is whether it is comprised of sources which date from its editor's lifetime, and to what extent is it comprised of earlier, or later sources. Common questions include whether the Mishnaic disputes are distinguishable along theological or communal lines, and in what ways different sections derive from different schools of thought within early Judaism. In response to these questions, modern scholars have adopted a number of different approaches.

Traditionally, rabbinic Judaism has viewed the statements in the Mishna and Talmud as being historically accurate, and written under a subtle form of divine inspiration, sometimes called the Ruach haKodesh, "The Holy Spirit." In this view, the statements described therein are reliable and accepted as much. Nevertheless, even the Talmud points out that the Mishna is on occasions ambiguous or deficient. In general, textual criticism of the Mishna from Orthodox point-of-view has ceased after the completion of the Talmud, and modern attempts at textual criticism are mainly considered heretical (Porton, 1982). Most Orthodox Jews view the biographical statements in the Mishnah, Talmud and in some cases, even the early midrash collections, as being entirely historically reliable.