The Mishnah: Religious Perspectives

Condensing research concerning questions of religion which encompass the social history of ideas and the religious uses of language, this book deals with three questions: the relationship of the Mishnah to Scripture, the relationship of the religious ideas people hold to the world in which they live, and the religious meaning of the formalization of language that characterizes the Mishnah in particular.
In discussing how the Mishnah relates to Scripture - in the (later) mythic language of Rabbinic Judaism: "the oral Torah" to "the written Torah" - a complete analysis is presented, based on a systematic application of a single taxonomic program. Then an examination is made of how the stages in the unfolding of the Halakhah of the Mishnah relate to the principal events of the times, which delineate those stages. Here focus is given to those pre-70 C.E. components of the Halakhah that later come to the surface in the Mishnah, but discussion extends to the periods from the destruction of the Temple in 70 C.E. to the Bar Kokhba War, concluded in ca. 135 C.E., then from the reconstruction, 135 C.E., to the closure of the Mishnah, 200 C.E. Finally attention is given to methods of interpreting the rhetorical forms of the Mishnah in the context of the social culture laid bare by the socio-linguistics of the documents concerned.

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Jacob Neusner, Ph.D. (1960), Columbia University, is Distinguished Research Professor of Religious Studies at the University of South Florida and Professor of Religion at Bard College. In a remarkable career spanning more than 35 years, Professor Neusner has taught and conducted research at centers in North America, Asia and Europe including Dartmouth College, Brown University, the Institute for Advanced Study Princeton, Cambridge University, the University of Göttingen and Uppsala University. Honored by awards from many of the world’s scholarly societies, his prodigious corpus of published work includes scores of seminal books and essays on Jewish life, law, ideas and tradition which have made him one of the most influential figures in his field in the modern period.