Unit 4 · From Sinai to the Mishnah

The word Torah means teaching. In Jewish tradition it names the first five books of the Hebrew Bible. They are Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. They tell how the world began. They tell about Abraham’s family. They tell how Moses led the people out of Egypt. They also hold many rules for daily life.

A synagogue is a Jewish house of worship. There the Torah is kept as a scroll. A scribe writes it by hand on long sheets of parchment. The sheets are sewn together. Then they are rolled around two wooden poles. On Shabbat and many other days, a reader unrolls the scroll. She or he chants a part of it aloud.

Rabbinic tradition calls this the Written Torah. It is written, so anyone who can read Hebrew can look at the words. The rabbis of the Talmud treated every word of it with care. They also noticed something. Many of its rules are short. A short rule leaves a lot of questions. That is where the next lesson begins.

The Talmud tells of a second Torah. Rabbinic tradition holds that at Mount Sinai, Moses received the Written Torah and also an Oral Torah. Oral means spoken. The Oral Torah was the set of explanations that went with the written words. It told how to do what the Written Torah said.

According to this tradition, the Oral Torah was not written down for a very long time. A teacher said it to a student. The student learned it by heart. Then that student taught it to the next one. The rabbis called this passing on a tradition, something handed from one person to the next.

Not everyone reads this story the same way. Orthodox Jews hold that the Oral Torah truly came from Sinai. Many Conservative and Reform Jews see it as the wisdom of teachers over many centuries. Historians study when each part was written down. In this course we describe what the tradition says and how its readers understand it.

The Written Torah says to remember Shabbat, the seventh day, and keep it holy. It says not to do any work on that day. That sounds simple. But try to use the rule. Is cooking work? Is carrying a book work? Is walking to a friend’s house work? The Torah does not give a list.

The rabbis said the Oral Torah answers these questions. The Mishnah, in tractate Shabbat, lists thirty-nine kinds of work. Planting, baking, sewing and writing are on the list. So is carrying from one place to another. Jewish tradition links them to building the tabernacle, the tent of worship in the desert.

This is the pattern for the whole course. A short rule in the Written Torah leads to a question. The question leads to a discussion. The discussion leads to a ruling, and often to a second opinion that is kept too. The rabbis believed that asking a good question was a way of honoring the Torah.

Long before the Talmud, the Jewish people came home from exile in Babylon. Their first Temple in Jerusalem had been destroyed. They built a second one. Then a scribe named Ezra came from Babylon. The Bible says he had set his heart on studying the Torah and teaching it.

The book of Nehemiah tells what happened next. Ezra stood on a wooden platform in a square in Jerusalem. He opened the scroll, and the whole crowd stood up. He read from morning until midday. Men, women and children old enough to understand were there. Helpers stood among the people and explained the reading so everyone understood.

Historians date this reading to about 450 BCE, though the exact year is debated. Rabbinic tradition loves this scene. It shows the Written Torah being read aloud and the meaning being explained at the same time. To the rabbis, Ezra looked like one of them. Later teachers said that if Moses had not come first, Ezra would have been worthy to receive the Torah.

Pirkei Avot lists the chain of teachers. After the prophets, it names the Men of the Great Assembly. Rabbinic tradition pictures them as a large council of scholars in the time of Ezra and after. The tradition holds that they kept the Oral Torah alive and helped shape Jewish prayer.

Avot says the Men of the Great Assembly taught three sayings. Be careful in judgment. Raise up many students, called disciples. Make a fence around the Torah. A fence is a rule that keeps you a safe step away from breaking a bigger rule. For example, a fence might say to stop work a little before Shabbat begins.

Historians know very little about this group. The Talmud and the Mishnah are the main places it is described. So some scholars treat the Great Assembly as a name for the many teachers of that time. Jewish tradition, in turn, treats it as a real council. In this course, both readings are worth knowing.

The Temple was the great house of worship in Jerusalem. Jewish tradition says King Solomon built the first one. The Babylonians destroyed it in 586 BCE. When the people came home, they built a second one. Historians date its finishing to about 515 BCE. It was later made much larger by King Herod.

In the Second Temple, priests offered gifts of animals, grain and wine. Each gift was a sacrifice. People came from far away for three big festivals each year. Passover, Shavuot and Sukkot all brought crowds to Jerusalem. The Torah gave rules for each festival, and the Oral Torah, tradition holds, explained how to keep them.

The Second Temple stood for about five hundred years. During those years the chain of teachers went on. The Written Torah was read. The Oral Torah was taught. Different Jewish groups grew up in Jerusalem, and they did not all agree. The next section meets two of them.

Near the end of the Second Temple period, several Jewish groups lived in the Land of Israel. Two of them argued about the Oral Torah. The Pharisees taught that the traditions handed down from the elders were part of God’s teaching. The Sadducees said that only the Written Torah counted.

The Jewish historian Josephus, who lived in the first century CE, wrote about both groups. He says the Pharisees followed many rules passed down from their ancestors that were not written in the Torah of Moses. He says the Sadducees rejected those rules. Many Sadducees were priests and wealthy families. Many Pharisees were teachers of ordinary people.

When the Temple was destroyed in 70 CE, the Sadducees lost their center. The Pharisees’ way of study continued. The rabbis of the Mishnah and Talmud saw themselves as heirs of the Pharisees. That is one reason the Talmud is full of the Oral Torah, the traditions the Pharisees had defended.

Pirkei Avot names five pairs of teachers after the Men of the Great Assembly. The last pair is Hillel and Shammai. Historians place them around the end of the first century BCE, when Herod was king. Tradition says Hillel came from Babylon to study in Jerusalem and became a leading teacher there.

The Talmud tells many stories about the two. Hillel is shown as patient and gentle. Shammai is shown as strict and quick. In one story, a man asks each of them to teach the whole Torah while he stands on one foot. Shammai sends him away. Hillel says: what is hateful to you, do not do to another; the rest is explanation, go and learn.

Each teacher had students. Their students formed two schools, the House of Hillel and the House of Shammai. The schools disagreed on hundreds of rules. The Mishnah records both sides. Rabbinic tradition holds that the law usually follows the House of Hillel, but it keeps the House of Shammai’s view on the page too.

The Written Torah names holidays but leaves out many details. It says to dwell in booths on Sukkot for seven days. It does not say how big a booth must be. It does not say what the roof is made of. It says to eat unleavened bread on Passover. It does not say what to do with bread you forgot in a cupboard.

The Mishnah fills in the details. Tractate Sukkah begins with how tall a booth may be. The Houses of Hillel and Shammai even argue about a booth’s roof. Tractate Pesachim tells how to search the house for leavened bread. This happens the night before Passover, by the light of a lamp.

This is how the Oral Torah worked, as rabbinic tradition tells it. Rules were passed down, questions were asked, and answers were argued. The details were still in memory when the Second Temple fell. In the next chapter, a rabbi carried out of a burning city helps keep them from being lost.

For about a hundred years, Rome had ruled the Land of Israel. Roman governors taxed the people and put down protests. In 66 CE a revolt broke out. Jewish fighters drove out the Roman soldiers. Rome sent a large army. The general Vespasian led it, and later his son Titus.

In the summer of 70 CE, after a long siege, Roman soldiers broke into Jerusalem. They set fire to the Temple. Jewish tradition remembers that day with a fast. It falls on the ninth of the month of Av. The historian Josephus was there with the Roman side. He wrote a long account of the fall of the city.

The Temple had been the center of Jewish worship. Sacrifices could only be offered there. Now it was gone. Rabbinic tradition tells that Rabban Yochanan ben Zakkai comforted a student who wept at the ruins. He said that acts of kindness could also bring people close to God. Prayer, study and kindness became the heart of Jewish life.

Yavneh was a small town near the coast, south of today’s Tel Aviv. After 70 CE it became a center of Jewish learning. Rabban Yochanan ben Zakkai taught there. His students, and their students, are the first rabbis whose names fill the Mishnah. The word rabbi means my teacher.

The teachers at Yavneh made rules for a world without a Temple. Tradition says Rabban Yochanan made a ruling about the shofar, a ram’s horn. It could be blown on Rosh Hashanah at Yavneh, as it once was in the Temple. Later, Rabban Gamliel led the school. Tradition holds that he helped set the order of daily prayer.

Historians see Yavneh as the start of rabbinic Judaism, the form of Judaism built on the rabbis’ teaching. The Talmud tells its story with legends and details. What historians can say for sure is smaller. Both views agree that after the Temple fell, study and prayer became central.

The Oral Torah lived in memory. Every teacher held a piece of it. If a teacher died before passing it on, that piece could be lost. In the years after 70 CE, many teachers died. War, hunger and Roman punishment took them. The rabbis began to worry.

In 132 CE a second revolt broke out, led by Simon Bar Kokhba. It lasted about three years and ended in defeat. Rabbinic tradition says Rome then forbade the teaching of Torah. It tells that Rabbi Akiva kept teaching and was put to death. Many of his students died too. The rabbis moved north to the Galilee, to towns like Usha.

The teachers who survived did something new. They began to gather the teachings into short, clear sayings that could be learned by heart. Each saying was called a mishnah, from a Hebrew word for repeating. Students repeated them until they knew them cold. These collections became the raw material for the book you meet next.

Judah the Prince was born, tradition says, around the time of the Bar Kokhba revolt. He came from the family of Hillel. He became the Nasi, the prince or leader of the Jewish community under Roman rule. He was wealthy, respected by Roman officials, and a great scholar. The Talmud calls him simply Rabbi, the teacher.

Rabbi Judah lived in the Galilee, first in Bet She’arim and later in Sepphoris. He gathered the teachings of the earlier rabbis, the tannaim. He sorted them by subject. He chose which sayings to keep and how to word them. He kept many disagreements, naming who said what. Historians date the finished Mishnah to about 200 CE.

Was the Mishnah written on a scroll or held in memory? Scholars debate this. Some say Rabbi Judah arranged it to be memorized. Others say it was written down early. Either way, from about 200 CE on, the Mishnah was a fixed text. Every rabbi after him studied the same six orders in the same words.

The Mishnah is sorted into six orders. In Hebrew each order is a seder, the same word used for the Passover meal. The orders are Seeds, Festivals, Women, Damages, Holy Things and Purities. Together they hold sixty-three tractates, or books, each on one subject.

Seeds is about farming and blessings. Festivals is about Shabbat and the holidays. Women is about marriage and family. Damages is about courts, money, harm and fairness. Holy Things is about the Temple and its offerings. Purities is about what is clean and unclean for Temple purposes. Pirkei Avot sits inside the order of Damages.

The orders show what the rabbis cared about. Two whole orders are about a Temple that no longer stood. The rabbis kept studying its rules anyway. Jewish tradition holds that studying the rules counts as a kind of keeping them. Historians see it as a way of keeping the Temple alive in memory.

Open the Mishnah and you find short sentences. Each one states a rule or a case. The language is Hebrew, a plain and clear Hebrew that scholars call Mishnaic Hebrew. There is very little story and very little explaining. The Mishnah says what the rule is. It rarely says why.

The Mishnah also records disagreement. A rule will be stated, and then: Rabbi Judah says otherwise. Or: the House of Shammai say this, and the House of Hillel say that. The first tractate, Berakhot, starts with a question about when to say the evening Shema. Three answers are given, from three teachers.

Why keep the losing side? Rabbinic tradition gives an answer in the Mishnah itself. It says a court might one day agree with the lost opinion, so it must be on the page. The Mishnah is short because it was made to be remembered. It keeps the arguments because, to the rabbis, the arguing was part of the Torah.

The Mishnah solved one problem and made another. The Oral Torah was now safe in a fixed text. But the text was short. It said what the rule was, not why. A student who read that the evening Shema is said when the priests go in to eat would ask: why the priests? What time is that?

So the rabbis after Rabbi Judah studied the Mishnah the way earlier rabbis had studied the Torah. They asked what each line meant. They compared one mishnah to another. They brought in old teachings that were left out of the Mishnah. Each one is called a baraita. This discussion, in the Land of Israel and in Babylon, went on for about three hundred years.

That discussion is the Gemara. The word means completion or learning in Aramaic. Mishnah plus Gemara equals Talmud. So the Mishnah is like a seed. The Gemara grew from it, and the Talmud is the whole tree. The next unit follows that growing.

The Mishnah is not only about Temple and festival. Much of it is about fairness between people. In the order of Damages, one tractate says that a worker must be paid on time. Another is about lost objects. If a lost thing has a sign on it, the finder must announce it. Then the owner can claim it.

The order of Seeds has a rule for farmers. Leave the corners of the field for the poor and the stranger. This comes from the Torah. The Mishnah works out how big a corner should be. It treats these gifts as the poor person’s right, not just as kindness.

Tractate Sanhedrin, about courts, is careful with people on trial. When a life is at stake, it says, witnesses must be warned first. One person, it says, is like a whole world. Rabbinic tradition reads these rules as mercy built into law. In this course, mercy and argument are the two threads to follow.

Look back at the two chapters of this unit. In rabbinic tradition, the chain starts with Moses at Sinai. It runs through Joshua, the elders, the prophets, the Men of the Great Assembly and the pairs. It reaches Hillel and Shammai. Then it reaches the teachers of Yavneh and, at last, Rabbi Judah the Prince.

Along that chain, the Oral Torah was spoken and remembered. Ezra read the Written Torah aloud and had it explained. The Pharisees defended the traditions of the elders. The Temple fell, and the rabbis feared forgetting. So Rabbi Judah gathered the teachings into a short, clear book: the Mishnah, c. 200 CE.

Different readers tell this chain differently. Orthodox tradition holds that every link goes back to Sinai. Many Conservative and Reform readers see a growing tradition shaped by people in each age. Historians test each link against evidence. All of them agree that the Mishnah became the foundation for everything the Talmud built next.