Mishnah and Tosefta
MISHNAH AND TOSEFTA. The Mishnah is a law code and school book, containing the legal and theological system of Judaism. It was brought to closure about 200 CE under the auspices of the head of the Jewish community of the Holy Land at that time, Yehudah ha-Nasiʾ, and has remained the foundation stone of Judaism from that time to the present. The Tosefta is a collection of supplements to the Mishnah, with approximately three-fourths devoted merely to citation and amplification of the contents of the Mishnah. The other fourth of the whole is constituted by laws essentially autonomous of, but correlative to, the Mishnah's laws. The Tosefta has no independent standing, being organized around the Mishnah. Tosefta was formulated and gathered together some time in the centuries following the closure of the Mishnah, with the fifth century being a safe guess for the time of closure. These two documents together are extensively cited and analyzed in the two Talmuds, one produced in Babylonia about 500 CE, the other in the Land of Israel about 400 CE.
The Mishnah (with the Tosefta) is important in Judaism because it is represented, from the time of its closure onward, as part of "the one whole Torah of Moses, our rabbi," that is, as revealed to Moses at Sinai by God.
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