The manner in which the lists were incorporated into the Mishnah (Hebrew)

• In Event: Bible and Rabbinical Literature: Textual Approaches

Abstract

One of the earliest questions that has preoccupied scholars of the Mishnah is the relationship between the Mishnah of Rabbi Judah Hanasi, which is arranged mainly by topics and internal content, and the mishnayot arranged according to a formalistic scheme: lists of mishnayot whose common denominator is an external factor, such as the names of the sages, a similar linguistic pattern, and so forth—a style that seems intended to aid memory. Researchers have also debated the question of the degree of the Mishnah editor’s involvement in these lists. Did he insert them as they were, or did he, perhaps, add explanations and details, or shorten them when he included them in the Mishnah?

In some instances, the formally arranged lists are related to the tractate in which they appear through the first case in the list, which is related to the topic of the tractate. In these cases, the prevailing research assumption is that this is precisely the reason why Rabbi included them in our Mishnah specifically in this place.

It seems, however, that this question has not been examined systematically, and a careful examination of the various lists shows that in many cases, the reality is the opposite: after the editor decided to insert the list into a particular tractate, he changed the order of the original list so that the first item would be related to that tractate. In other cases, the editor of the Mishnah was the one who added a case related to the topic of the tractate to the original list, thus creating the connection between the original list and the tractate in which the list was incorporated. This lecture is devoted to examining this issue, and its conclusions require rethinking the reason for the inclusion of these lists in the various tractates.

Author

• Yosef Marcus, Herzog Academic College