Form and Meaning in Mishnah

Abstract

The social aspect of the linguistic character of Mishnah-Tosefta, one of the two principal documents of Judaism, with special reference to the Order of Purities, is analyzed. Mishnah is formulated within a few tightly disciplined formulaic patterns. What do we learn about the minds of people who redacted and formulated the document in that way? First, they proposed that Mishnah would be transmitted through memorization and not through writing, even though there were no technical disadvantages to the preservation of materials in writing. Second, the system of grammar and syntax distinctive to Mishnah expresses conventions intelligible to the members of a particular community, the rabbis who stand behind and later preserved Mishnah. It is not a public and ordinary language at all, even though Middle Hebrew, of which Mishnaic Hebrew is only one exemplum, may have been a spoken language. Mishnaic language is expressive and conative. Mishnaic forms are rhetorical, empty of content, serviceable for a wide variety of themes. They are based on deep syntactical recurrences, not on surface-patterns of rhyme, rhythm, or sound. Mishnah's susceptibility to memorization rests principally upon the utter abstract of recurrent syntactical patterns, rather then on concrete repetition of particular rhythms, syllabic counts, or sounds. The people who memorized conceptions reduced to these forms were capable of extraordinarily abstract perception. They perceived, beneath the diversities of language, the unstated principle and the unsounded pattern. Mishnah's formalized grammatical rhetoric creates a world of discourse quite distinct from the concrete realities of a given time, place, or society. Unchanging and enduring patterns lie deep in the inner structure of reality and impose structure upon the accidents of the world. Reality for Mishnaic rhetoric consists in the deep syntax of language: consistent and enduring patterns of relationship among diverse and changing concrete things or persons. What lasts is not the concrete thing but the abstract principle governing the interplay of concrete things. Just as we accomplish memorization by perceiving not what is said but how it is said and persistently arranged, so we speak to undertake to address and describe a world in which what is concrete and material is secondary to how things are Jacob Neusner is University Professor, Professor of Religious Studies, and The Ungerleider Distinguished Scholar of Judaic Studies at Brown University. He is author of A History of the Mishnaic Law of Purities, Vols. I-XX, and The Academic Study of Judaism, Essays and Reflections, 2 vols. This content downloaded from 157.55.39.104 on Sun, 19 Jun 2016 06:03:23 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms