Mishna

Exodus instructs each family in Egypt to slaughter a paschal lamb and eat it at home, while Deuteronomy commands a community ritual, to take place at the central worship location, i.e., the Jerusalem Temple. These two conceptions cross-pollinate, first in the Torah and then in its early reception: Jubilees requires everyone to eat in the Temple as their home; the Mishnah requires everyone to slaughter together in three cohorts; most surprisingly, R. Eliezer claims that, in theory, all of Israel can share one paschal animal.

Calendrical disputes, which recurred frequently in ancient and medieval Jewish communities, created alternative dates for festivals such as Yom Kippur and Passover. Here, we look at four disputes and the different ways that communities navigated them. 

The Mishnah adds further humiliation to the biblical sotah ritual for a suspected adulteress. Other rabbinic texts from the same period critique this expansion, as well as the gender inequality inherent in the ritual itself.

In halakha, the 39 melachot of Mishnah Shabbat 7:2 functions as a comprehensive list of primary categories of forbidden labor. A closer look at the list in context, however, reveals that it was composed and added as a supplement, to clarify a detail in the previous mishnah.

The Torah’s program to democratize knowledge and create an educated laity.

The missing links

An ancient Yelamdeinu Rabbeinu homily connects the covenantal nature of the prohibition to write down the Oral Law, and recite the Written Torah orally, to a novel reading of Gen 18:17-19: God’s choice of Abraham and his descendants to be exclusive participants in God’s own mystery cult.

Bringing wood for the altar was an important celebration in Second Temple times. To ground this practice in the Torah, Nehemiah (10:35) describes it as a Torah law, while the Temple Scroll (11Q19) and the Reworked Pentateuch (4Q365) include it in their biblical festival calendar.