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2 results

The Cambridge Companion to Law in the Hebrew Bible
  • Edited by Bruce Wells
  • Published online:
    11 April 2024
    Print publication:
    18 April 2024
  • This Companion offers a comprehensive overview of the history, nature, and legacy of biblical law.  Examining the debates that swirl around the nature of biblical law, it explores its historical context, the significance of its rules, and its influence on early Judaism and Christianity. The volume also interrogates key questions: Were the rules intended to function as ancient Israel's statutory law? Is there evidence to indicate that they served a different purpose? What is the relationship between this legal material and other parts of the Hebrew Bible? Most importantly, the book provides an in-depth look at the content of the Torah's laws, with individual essays on substantive, procedural, and ritual law. With contributions from an international team of experts, written specially for this volume, The Cambridge Companion to Law in the Hebrew Bible provides an up-to-date look at scholarship on biblical law and outlines themes and topics for future research.

  • Chapter 4 - What Is the Mishnah?

  • David C. Kraemer, Jewish Theological Seminary, New York
  • Book:
    A History of the Talmud
    Published online:
    18 July 2019
    Print publication:
    03 October 2019, pp 58-81

  • Summary

    In this chapter, we seek to understand the Mishnah and its meanings in its final form. We consider the shape of the Mishnah, the subjects it does and does not include, the qualities of its language and rhetoric, its relationship to canonical scripture and other parts of the pre-rabbinic tradition, and so forth. Crucially, we analyze a variety of key examples of the Mishnah to gain a genuine sense of its approaches. With an eye toward these considerations, we review the range of characterizations that have been offered for the Mishnah. We consider the theories of modern scholars who have made claims for the meaning of the Mishnah in its late antique Palestinian context and suggest some refinements of our own. In the end, we emerge with an appreciation of both the Mishnah’s rhetoric of tradition, on the one hand, and its bona fide radical qualities, on the other. Having characterized the Mishnah, to the best of our abilities, we then consider the question of when the Mishnah came to the precise shape we know, and ask about its realm of authority, whether among the rabbis or beyond.