Theme for discussion:
Can the number of our duties be specified?
CHAPTER XXXI.
THE MISHNA.
All the supplementary laws that grew up around the written Codes of the Bible were called, by distinction, the Oral Law. These included the decisions of the Scribes (p. 19), the Pairs (pp. 87-8) and the Tannäim (p. 186). Rabbi Judah the Nasi made a compilation of all of these and called it The Mishna. Derived from the Hebrew verb shanah, to learn or repeat, the Mishna is popularly known as the Second Law. It became the recognized code for all legal decisions, and the authorized text-book in all the schools.
It now took its place beside the Law of the Pentateuch, and just as that first Law was a text for further development, so too we shall see that this Second Law, containing Halachoth of the Sopherim, the Pairs and the Tannäim, became the parent of a vast growth of precepts and prohibitions in the interpreting hands of the generations now to follow.
The Mishna is divided into six groups (Sedarim) containing sixty subdivisions (Mesechtas), as follows: