مشناه

have been supposed that the usage lacked Biblical sanction. But whether the Oral Law was deducible from the Written Law or not, the accepted hypothesis was that it was delivered from Mount Sinai at the same time as the Written Law, and preserved by word of mouth, generation after generation, until it found permanent expression in the Mishnah. Between the Written Law and the Oral Law there could be no contradiction: both claimed the same divine origin and both possessed the same authority and binding force. Although the Mishnah was compiled in its present form at the end of the second century, it deals fully with phases of legislation and religious practice which for more than a hundred years had ceased to have any practical bearing on Jewish life. The destruction of Jerusalem in A.D. 70 made an end of the last vestiges of national self-government, and it marked also the extinction of the pnesthood and the Temple worship which until then had been the centre o' Jewish national and religious life. The Mish¬ nah ’s minute treatment or the Temple cultus and its portrayal of Jewish religious and secular life (with few exceptions) as though the nation still enjoyed privileges lost to it generations earlier, constitute the Mishnah’s chief value as well as the chief problem in its study. It is a matter of extreme difficulty to decide what historical value we should attach to any tradition recorded in the Mishnah.…