Sources: The Mishnah itself (6 sedarim, 63 tractates); Talmud Bavli Bava Metzia 59b (the “oven of Akhnai” story); Avot 1:1 (the chain of tradition).

The Mishnah (from shanah — to repeat, to study) is the first written codification of the Oral Torah, edited by Rabbi Judah HaNasi (Judah the Prince, ~135–220 AD) around 200 AD. The decision to write down the Oral Torah was itself a crisis response: after the Bar Kokhba catastrophe and the deaths of so many sages, the oral tradition was at risk of being lost. The Mishnah is organized into six Sedarim (orders): Zeraim (agricultural laws and prayer), Moed (festivals), Nashim (family law), Nezikin (civil and criminal law), Kodashim (Temple service — codified even though the Temple was gone), and Tohorot (purity laws). Its form is distinctive: it records rabbinic debates including minority opinions and rejected positions, not just the accepted rulings. This preservation of dissent is theologically programmatic — the “oven of Akhnai” story (Bava Metzia 59b) where God’s own voice (bat kol) is overruled by the majority of rabbis, who cite Deuteronomy 30:12 (“It is not in heaven”), establishes that Torah interpretation now belongs to the human community of scholars, not to direct divine intervention. The Mishnah is the foundation text of all subsequent Jewish law and becomes the subject of the two Talmuds.