The Mishnah's Reader: Reconsidering Literary Meaning

Abstract:The Mishnah is both the best-organized work of rabbinic literature and not entirely consistent in its organization. These aspects led to robust scholarly debates about the Mishnah as a work of literature. Recent overview scholarship has highlighted the inconsistency and refused to attempt to define the Mishnah's literary genre. This essay draws on three common mishnaic phenomena to highlight the ways the Mishnah asks to be read. It argues that the Mishnah employs legal couplets (paired statutory case presentations) to communicate the presence of underlying conceptual meaning and to train the reader to mine the text for such meaning. It shows that the Mishnah stacks couplets like building blocks to produce ever-richer conceptual understandings of mishnaic information. Finally, it highlights and embraces the role that readers must play in producing the Mishnah's fullest meaning.