The heirs of the initial, philosophical Judaism received a system in which the subject of economics—the rational disposition of scarce resources—was utilized in order to set forth a systemic statement of fundamental importance. While making every effort to affirm the details of that statement and apply them, their system repeated the given but made no significant use of what had been received. Instead the heirs of the Mishnah invented what we must call a counterpart-category, that is to say, a category that dealt with problems of the rational utilization of scarce resources, but not with those same scarce resources defined by the philosophical system of the Mishnah. The systemic category for the aborning religious system was not an economics, but corresponded, in the new system, to the position and role of economics in the old.
A well-crafted theory of a social entity knows how and why scarce resources are assigned to, or end up in the hands of, one person or institution or class or other social organization, rather than some other. That system, in designing the social order, has worked out an economics for itself.1 The Mishnah’s system—alone among all of the Judaic (and Christian) systems of late antiquity2—set forth as part of its systemic composition a fully-articulated economics, entirely congruent with the philosophical economics of Aristotle, answering questions concerning the definition of wealth, property, production and the means of production, ownership and control of the means of production, the determination of price and value and the like.
And that fact signifies that the Judaic system to which the Mishnah attests is philosophical not only in method and message but in its very systemic composition. The principal components of its theory of the social order, its account of the way of life of its Israel and its picture of the conduct of the public policy of its social entity,—all of these in detail correspond in their basic definitions and indicative traits with the economics and the politics of Greco-Roman philosophy in the Aristotelian tradition. Specifically, the Mishnah’s economics, in general in the theory of the rational disposition of scarce resources and of the management and increase thereof, and specifically in its definitions of wealth and ownership, production and consumption, point by point, corresponds to that of Aristotle.3
To be sure, sayings relevant to an economics may take shape within a religion or a philosophy, without that religion’s or philosophy’s setting forth an economics at all. For unsystematic opinions on this and that, for instance, episodic sayings about mercy to the poor, recommendations of right action, fairness, honesty, and the like do not by themselves add up to an economics. Indeed, one of the marks of a system’s lacking an economics is the presence of merely occasional and ad hoc remarks about matters of wealth or poverty that, all together, attest to complete indifference to the systemic importance of a theory of the rational disposition of scarce resources, their preservation and increase. By contrast, when issues of the rational disposition of scarce resources are treated in a sustained and systematic, internally coherent theory that over all and in an encompassing way explains why this, not that, and defines market in relationship to ownership of the means of production, then we have a systematic account, an economics. Not only so, but, as in the case of Aristotle’s economics, the economics will prove to serve the interests of the system of which it is part when it makes a statement in behalf of that larger system. Through economics, the Mishnah’s system makes a critical part of its systemic statement, and this authorship found economics, and only economics, the appropriate medium for making that part of its statement.
But for antiquity only two theories of economics, Aristotle’s and the Mishnah’s, delivered principal parts of systemic statements. There are no other candidates for inclusion on the list of significant thinkers and system-builders to whom an account of an economics mattered in a systematic way in a systemic composition.4 While other systems made episodic reference to topics of economic interest, Plato’s for instance, and any number of other figures allude to issues of wealth, Jesus for the most important example, and in his model, a great many important figures in early Christianity,—none produced a well-crafted account of the wealth, the market, exchange, money, value, the definition of the unit and means of production, and other basic components of an economics, let alone a composition of all those things into a coherent statement. And—more to the point—none but Aristotle’s and the Mishnah’s systems undertook to make a fundamental point in its discussion of topics of economic interest. But Aristotle’s and the Mishnah’s systems not only did so, they did so in this-worldly terms, by appeal to well-crafted philosophical principles about the character of society and politics. That is why I characterize the Mishnah’s economics as philosophical, and why, furthermore, when we understand that the Mishnah sets forth an economics in the way it does rather than in some other, we see that economics forms an indicator of the philosophical character of the Mishnah as a system.5
The general point in common between Aristotle’s and the Mishnah’s economics comes first: for both systems economics formed a chapter in a larger theory of the social order. The power of economics as framed by Aristotle, the only economic theorist of antiquity worthy of the name, was to develop the relationship between the economy to society as a whole.6 And the framers of the Mishnah did precisely that when they incorporated issues of economics at a profound theoretical level into the system of society as a whole that they proposed to construct. That is why (to paraphrase Polanyi’s judgment of Aristotle) the authorship of the Mishnah will be seen as attacking the problem of man’s livelihood within a system of sanctification of a holy people with a radicalism of which no later religious thinkers about utopias were capable. None has ever penetrated deeper into the material organization of man’s life under the aspect of God’s rule. In effect, they posed, in all its breadth, the question of the critical, indeed definitive place occupied by the economy in society under God’s rule.
The points in common between Aristotle’s and the Mishnah’s economics in detail prove no less indicative. Both Aristotle and the Mishnah presented an anachronistic system of economics. The theory of both falls into the same classification of economic theory, that of distributive economics, familiar in the Near and Middle East from Sumerian times down to, but not including, the age of Aristotle (let alone that of the Mishnah five centuries later). But market-economics had been well-established prior to Aristotle’s time. Let me briefly explain the difference between the two, which is a fundamental indicator in classifying economics. In market economics merchants transfer goods from place to place in response to the working of the market mechanism, which is expressed in price. In distributive economics, by contrast, traders move goods from point to point in response to political commands. In market economics, merchants make the market work by calculations of profit and loss. In distributive economics, there is no risk of loss on a transaction.7 In market economics, money forms an arbitrary measure of value, a unit of account. In distributive economics, money gives way to barter and bears only intrinsic value, as do the goods for which it is exchanged. It is understood as “something that people accept not for its inherent value in use but because of what it will buy.”8 The idea of money requires the transaction to be complete in the exchange not of goods but of coins. The alternative is the barter transaction, in which, in theory at least, the exchange takes place when goods change hands. In distributive economics money is an instrument of direct exchange between buyers and sellers, not the basic resource in the process of production and distribution that it is in market economics. Aristotle’s economics is distributive for systemic reasons, the Mishnah’s replicates the received principles of the economics planned by the Temple priests and set forth in the Priestly Code of the Pentateuch, Leviticus in particular. The result—fabricated or replicated principles—was the same.
Both systems—the Mishnah’s and Aristotle’s—in vast detail expressed the ancient distributive economics, in their theories of fixed value and conception of the distribution of scarce resources by appeal to other than the rationality of the market. The theory of money characteristic of Aristotle (but not of Plato) and of the Mishnah for instance conforms to that required by distributive economics; exchange takes place through barter, not through the abstract price-setting mechanism represented by money. Consequently, the representation of the Mishnah as a philosophical Judaism derives from not only general characteristics but very specific and indicative traits held in common with the principal figure of the Greco-Roman philosophical tradition in economics.9
There was a common social foundation for the economic theory of both systems.10 Both Aristotle and the Mishnah’s framers deemed the fundamental unit of production to be the household, and the larger social unit, the village, composed of households, marked the limits of the social entity. The Mishnah’s economic tractates, such as the Babas, on civil law, invariably refer to the householder, making him the subject of most predicates; where issues other than economics are in play, e.g., in the political tractates such as Sanhedrin, the householder scarcely appears as a social actor. Not only so, but both Aristotle and the authorship of the Mishnah formed the conception of “true value,” which maintained that something—an object, a piece of land—possessed a value extrinsic to the market and intrinsic to itself, such that, if a transaction varied from that imputed true value by (in the case of the Mishnah) 18%, the exchange was null. Not only so, but the sole definition of wealth for both Aristotle’s and the Mishnah’s economics was real estate, only land however small. Since land does not contract or expand, of course, the conception of an increase in value through other than a steady-state exchange of real value, “true value,”11 between parties to a transaction lay outside of the theory of economics. Therefore all profit, classified as usury, was illegitimate and must be prevented.
Episodic details of these, and like, positions can have been, and surely were, entertained by a variety of system-builders in the same age. Plato, for instance, had a theory of money; Jesus, a theory of the negative value of wealth and ownership; and so forth. But only for Aristotle and the Mishnah’s framers do these conceptions coalesce to form an economics worthy of the name, one that moreover bears an important part of the systemic message. For in the case of the Mishnah’s and Aristotle’s economics the entire purpose of the system comes to expression in (among other aspects) the matter of a fully articulated economics. Aristotle’s interest in economics derived from his larger program of framing a political economics for the community at large.
Aristotle is the model of political economy. As Polanyi states, “Whenever Aristotle touched on a question of the economy he aimed at developing its relationship to society as a whole. The frame of reference was the community as such which exists at different levels within all functioning human groups. In terms, then, of our modern speech Aristotle’s approach to human affairs was sociological. In mapping out a field of study he would relate all questions of institutional origin and function to the totality of society. Community, self-sufficiency, and justice, were the focal concepts. The group as a going concern forms a community (koinonia) the members of which are linked by the bond of good will (philia). Whether oikos or polis [household or village], or else, there is a kind of philia specific to that koinonia, apart from which the group could not remain. Philia expresses itself in a behavior of reciprocity . . . , that is, readiness to take on burdens in turn and share mutually. Anything that is needed to continue and maintain the community, including its self-sufficiency . . . is “natural” and intrinsically right. Autarchy may be said to be the capacity to subsist without dependence on resources from outside.”12 We see, therefore, that, for Aristotle, economics formed an important building block in his larger system, and distributive economics in detail bore meanings for the larger political economy he was developing.
For Aristotle, the postulate of self-sufficiency governed all else; such trade as was required to restore self-sufficiency was natural and right, but that alone.13 The fundamental principle, with ample instantiation in the Mishnah’s economics as well, is therefore natural self-sufficiency attained by the oikos and the polis made up thereof: political economy: “The institution of equivalency exchange was designed to ensure that all householders had a claim to share in the necessary staples at given rates, in exchange for such staples as they themselves happened to possess. . . . barter derived from the institution of sharing of the necessities of life; the purpose of barter was to supply all householders with those necessities up to the level of sufficiency. . . .14 Accordingly, Aristotle’s economic theory rested on the sociology of the self-sufficient community, made up of self-sufficient, if mutually dependent households.
Aristotle’s is not the only economics to provide a parallel and counterpart to that of the Mishnah. In the case of the economics of the Mishnah’s Judaism, we have a replay, with important variations, of the old and well established distributive theory of economics in by the Priestly Code, spelled out in the rules of the biblical books of Leviticus and Numbers, upon details of which the Mishnah’s authorship drew very heavily. And in doing so, the economics of the Mishnah took its leave in important details from that of Aristotle. For in its most basic and distinctive conviction, the economics of the Mishnah’s Judaism rests upon the theory of the joint ownership, between God and the Israelite householder, of a designated piece of real estate. And in that system, all that mattered as wealth was that ownership that is shared between God and partners of a certain genus of humanity whose occupancy of that designated piece of real estate, but no other, affects the character of the dirt in question. Aristotle can never have accepted so particular, and so enchanted, a conception of wealth!
The theology of wealth, in both the Priestly Code and the Mishnah, consists in an account of what happens when ground of a certain locale is subject to the residency and ownership of persons of a certain genus of humanity. The generative conception of the theology involves a theory of the effect—the enchantment and transformation—that results from the intersection of “being Israel”: land, people, individual person alike. When we find evidence that wealth has meanings other than Israelite (normally, male) ownership of a piece of real estate in the Land of Israel in particular, we shall encounter evidence of the expansion and revision of the economics set forth in the Mishnah.
In detail the economic program of the Mishnah derived from the Priestly Code and other priestly writings within the pentateuchal mosaic. Indeed, at point after point, that authorship clearly intended merely to spin out details of the rules set forth in Scripture in general, and, in economic issues such as the rational use of scarce resources, the Priestly Code in particular. The Priestly Code assigned portions of the crop to the priesthood and Levites as well as to the caste comprising the poor; it intervened in the market processes affecting real estate by insisting that land could not be permanently alienated but reverted to its “original” ownership every fifty years; it treated some produce as unmarketable even though it was entirely fit; it exacted for the temple a share of the crop; it imposed regulations on the labor force that were not shaped by market considerations but by religious taboos, e.g., days on which work might not be performed, or might be performed only in a diminished capacity.
But the authorship of the Mishnah made its own points. The single most striking, already noted, is that the Mishnah’s system severely limited its economics—and therefore the social vision and pertinence of the realm of the system as a whole!—to [1] Israelite householders, meaning, [2] landowners, and among these, the male ones who [3] lived on real estate held to fall within the boundaries of the Land of Israel.15 The economics of the Mishnah eliminated from its conception of the economy [1] gentiles in the Land of Israel, [2] Israelites outside of the Land of Israel, and [3] Israelites in the Land of Israel who did not own land—which is to say, nearly everybody in the world except for a negligible minority. So the definition of “scarce resources” proved so particular as to call into question the viability of the economics as such and to recast economics into a (merely) systemic component. For when, in the Mishnah, we speak of the economic person, the one who owns “land,” it is only land that produces a crop liable to the requirements of the sacerdotal taxes.
It follows, therefore, that ownership of “land” speaks of a very particular acreage, specifically, the territory known to the framers of the Mishnah as the Land of Israel, that alone. Land not subject to the sacerdotal taxes is not land to which the legal status and traits before us are imputed. But there is a second equally critical qualification. Land in the land of Israel that is liable to sacerdotal taxes must be owned by an Israelite—a qualification beyond the imagination of the Priestly authorship of Leviticus seven hundred years earlier than the Mishnah. Gentiles are not expected to designate as holy portions of their crop, and if they do so, those portions of the crop that they designate as holy nonetheless are deemed secular. So we have an exceedingly specific set of conditions in hand.
And what is excluded must not be missed, or we fail to grasp the odd and distinctive character of the economics of the Mishnah. Wealth for the system of the Mishnah is not ownership of land in general, for example, land held by Jews in Babylonia, Egypt, Italy, or Spain. It is ownership of land located in a very particular place. And wealth for that same system is not wealth in the hands of an undifferentiated owner. It is wealth in the domain of an Israelite owner in particular.
Wealth therefore is ownership of land of Israel in two senses, both of them contained within the italicized words. It is ownership of land located in the land of Israel. It is ownership of land located in the land of Israel that is of Israel, belonging to an Israelite. “Israel” then forms the key to the meaning of wealth, because it modifies persons and land alike: only an Israel[ite] can possess the domain that signifies wealth; only a domain within the land called by the name of “Israel” can constitute wealth. It is in the enchanted intersection of the two Israels, (ownership of) the land, (ownership by) the people, that wealth in the system of the Mishnah finds realization. Like Aristotle’s selective delimitation of the economy, the Mishnah’s economics describes a tiny part of the actual economic life of the time and place and community.
Not only is the Mishnah’s economics rather truncated in its definition of wealth, but the range of economic theory in its distributive mode (as distinct from the market-mode) deals with only one kind of scarce resource, and that is food. True, goods and services, food and housing, were valued and understood to have value; but these are dealt with generally as components of the market, not of the distributive economics that is assumed to predominate. To identify that component of the goods and services of the market that is subjected to distributive, rather than market, economics, within the mixed economics at hand, we look, in particular, at food. The reason is that food alone is what is subjected to the distributive system at hand—food and, in point of fact, nothing else, certainly not capital, or even money. Manufactured goods and services, that is, shoes on the last, boards in the vise, not to mention intangibles such as medical and educational services, the services of clerks and scribes, goods in trade, commercial ventures of all kinds – none of these is subjected to the tithes and other sacerdotal offerings. The possibility of a mixed situation, in which a distributive economics leaves space for a market economics, rests upon the upshot of the claim that God owns the holy land. It is the land that God owns, and not the factory or shop, stall and store, ship and wagon, and other instruments and means of production. Indeed, the sole unit of production for which the Mishnah legislates in rich and profound exegetical detail is the agricultural one. The distributive component of the economy, therefore, is the one responsible for the production of food, inclusive of the raising of sheep, goats, and cattle.
The key then is definitive and locative, what is wealth, and where is wealth? We already know the answer to that question in its formulation in that curious and narrow, geographical-genealogical framework of the system: wealth is [1] land [2] held by Israelites [3] in the land of Israel. But that framework has now to be broadened considerably, since from the definition of wealth, we move to a question of considerable systemic consequence: ownership of the means of production, which amplifies the received theory of wealth. Wealth is the formation of [1] the unit and [2] means of production, the household, defined in terms of [3] command of a ownership of landed domain, however small. So wealth is located in the household, comprising, with other households, the village; the village defines the market in which all things hold together in an equal exchange of a stable population in a steady-state economy.
In this context, wealth of course is conceived as material, not figurative or metaphorical or spiritual,16 but it also is held to be as perfect, therefore unchanging, as is real property, not subject to increase or decrease, hence, by the way, the notion of true value imputed to commodities. For if we imagine a world in which, ideally, no one rises and no one falls, and in which wealth is essentially stable, then we want to know what people understand by money, on the one hand, and how they identify riches, on the other. The answer is very simple. For the system of the Mishnah, wealth constitutes that which is of lasting value, and what lasts is real property (in the land of Israel), that alone. Real estate (in the land of Israel) does not increase in volume, it is not subject to the fluctuation of the market (so it was imagined), it was permanent, reliable, and, however small, always useful for something. It was perceived to form the medium of enduring value for a society made up of households engaged in agriculture. Accordingly, the definition of wealth as real and not movable, as real estate (in the land of Israel) and no where else, real estate not as other kinds of goods, conformed to the larger systemic givens. A social system composed of units of production, households, engaged in particular in agricultural production, made a decision entirely coherent with its larger conception and character in identifying real estate as the sole measure of wealth. And, as we recall, Aristotle will not have been surprised, except, of course, by the rather peculiar definition of the sole real estate deemed of worth.
How was the philosophical economics of the Mishnah received? To begin with, the heirs of the system of the Mishnah read that document not whole and complete but phrase by phrase and sentence by sentence, breaking up its large units of discourse into discrete parts. Consequently, as a matter of hermeneutics, they received not the system, but only its constituent pieces. To those they devoted sustained efforts at clarification. But their exegetical method precluded a perceptive assessment of the document as a whole, focusing as it did on details. That explains why, as we shall see, the economics of the Mishnah defined not a category for exploration, expansion, revision, renovation, and reformation, but only a topic for discussion.
When we fully grasp the fate of philosophical economics in the successor-documents, we shall understand the full dimensions of the achievement of the authorships of the fourth and fifth century in building, essentially new and fresh, a system of their own, while at the same time receiving and preserving the words of the ancients. A consideration of how the philosophical economics was received will allow us to grasp the traits of intellect of the system-builders whose work is realized by the successor-documents. Rather than begin with generalizations on the method of the new authorships, let us turn directly to the concrete case at hand. What we shall see in detail will prepare us to interpret the entire work of the fourth-and fifth-century authorships in its own terms.
Nearly every discourse—perhaps 90% of the whole—of the Yerushalmi addresses one main point: the meaning of the Mishnah, read sentence by sentence. That fact gives us the impression, which is false, that for the Yerushalmi, the life of Israel reaches the level of analysis within the integument of the Mishnah. We may say, the Mishnah is about life, while the Yerushalmi is about the Mishnah. So a literary analysis will suggest. Only when we realize that, right alongside its reading of the Mishnah, the authorship of the Yerushalmi and companion-documents are bringing to expression a system of their own, one that is not at all continuous in its categories with the system of the Mishnah, shall we grasp the full subtlety, the polemical power, of the Yerushalmi’s character as what appears to be a mere commentary. That commentary-form wishes to lead us to the conclusion that the traits of the Mishnah have defined the problematic, of both intellect and politics, confronting the heirs of the Mishnah, the faithful disciples of the final generation of the Mishnah’s redaction and formulation onward. But as a matter of fact, in the invention of a categorical system entirely their own, these same people make a statement of their own, even while purporting to focus upon statements of others, prior to themselves.17
The Yerushalmi’s authorship invariably does to the Mishnah one of these four things: (1) text criticism; (2) exegesis of the meaning of the Mishnah-sentence or paragraph under discussion, including glosses and amplifications; (3) addition of scriptural proof texts of the Mishnah’s central propositions; and (4) harmonization of one Mishnah passage with another such passage or with a statement of Tosefta.l8 The first two of these four procedures remain wholly within the narrow frame of the Mishnah passage subject to discussion. The second pair take an essentially independent stance vis-a-vis the Mishnah pericope at hand.
Our brief survey of the reading of passages of economic importance indicates that the Mishnah is read by the Yerushalmi as a composite of discrete and essentially autonomous rules, a set of atoms, not an integrated molecule, so to speak.19 In so doing, the most striking formal traits of the Mishnah are obliterated. More important, the Mishnah as a whole and complete statement of a viewpoint no longer exists. Its propositions are reduced to details. On occasion, the details may be restated in generalizations encompassing a wide variety of other details across the gaps between one tractate and another. This immensely creative and imaginative approach to the Mishnah vastly expands the range of discourse. But the first, and deepest, consequence is to deny to the Mishnah both its own mode of speech and its distinctive and coherent message.
How in detail, then, does the Yerushalmi deal with the principal components of the economics of the Mishnah, such as the definitions of money, true value, wealth, and like indicators of the presence of a sophisticated system of economics? It amplifies, refines, complements, but it does not revise, innovate, or even renovate them. For example, in the discussion, critical to an understanding of the philosophical economics of the Mishnah, of the rule, “Silver acquires gold, but gold does not acquire silver, copper acquires silver, but silver does not acquire copper,” the Yerushalmi’s anonymous voice states as its opener: “This is the summary principle of the matter: Whatever is of lesser value than its fellow effects acquisition of its fellow [when it is drawn or lifted up]” (Y. Baba Mesia 4:1.I.A). The supplied language, of course, is mine, justified by the fact that, to the authorship of the Mishnah—and also therefore to the voice of the Yerushalmi—silver and gold are commodities, pure and simple, and all trade is au fond solely barter.
There is, furthermore, an interest in authorities, e.g., “Said R. Hiyya bar Ashi, “Who taught this Mishnah-paragraph, that silver acquires gold?” Implications are made explicit: “The implication of what the rabbi has said is that gold is in the status of a commodity.” We are given cases, e.g., “The daughter of R. Hiyya the Elder lent Rab golden denars. She came and asked her father [how to collect the debt, since in the meantime, gold had risen in value vis à vis silver]. He said to her, “Take from him good and substantial denars [of the same weight as those you lent]” (Y. Baba Mesia 4:1.I.H). That is the case even though she would profit handsomely in trading the gold for silver. There is, furthermore, interest in comparing one rule of the Mishnah to another rule of the same origin, and this governs much of the subsequent discussion.
The principal point of expansion, however, concerns not the conception of gold and silver as commodities for barter, but, rather, a quite different issue, hardly prominent in the Mishnah-paragraph though admittedly entirely present there. It has to do with the rules of acquisition, the point, in a transaction, at which one party has fully attained ownership of the object from the other. That is where we are given a variety of cases and expansions of the received rule. And that is not surprising, since, for administrators of the law, the issues of legal theory concerning abstract problems of economics do not impinge, while the concrete cases of who owns property or a person at a given instant require decisions everyday. All of these cases, of course, derive from the basic principle that transfer of funds does not complete a transaction; money is a commodity; only when the object itself has been handed over by the seller and received by the buyer is the transaction done. Up to that point, either party may still retract, and that is so even though money has changed hands.
So the facts of the law of the Mishnah govern, but the category of economics is essentially untouched. When the authorship of the Yerushalmi learns “silver acquires gold, but gold does not acquire silver,” they wish to spell out rules of acquisition,—but not principles of commodity barter as against the abstract conception of money, such as Aristotle had set forth and the Mishnah’s sages instantiated in the case of gold and silver. And, it goes without saying, the rest of Mishnah-tractate Baba Qamma Chapter Four is treated within that same focus of interest, on the concrete and immediate and not on the theoretical and the abstract; so what is made concrete is the Mishnah’s conception of money, not the principle money let alone the category of economics so far as it has to do with principles of the steady-state and self-sufficient economic entity, the household and the village made up of households.
What about the fundamental (if to us mysterious) conception of true, as distinct from market, value? Here too we find neither revision nor renovation, but only restatement; we do not understand the conception better after we have studied what the Yerushalmi’s authorship has to say than we did before we heard. There is no effort to explain, only to apply to concrete cases or to harmonize with other principles of law the conception that objects have an intrinsic worth, not dictated by the market, to which the market must conform. For example, at Mishnah-tractate Baba Mesia 4:3A, we are given a definition of fraud: “Fraud is an overcharge of four pieces of silver out of twenty-four pieces of silver to the sela, one-sixth of the purchase price.” The given conception, true value or inherent worth independent of the market, to be given by the purchaser and received by the seller of the object (“fraud applies to the buyer and the seller alike”), is restated, but the focus is on the application.
A brief account of the Talmud’s treatment of the subject shows the character of the Yerushalmi’s reception of the Mishnah’s category. We begin with the position that the assessment of fraud at a sixth overcharge is fact; we deem fraud to be an overcharge of a sixth of the true value of an object, so Rab. Yohanan maintains that it would apply to the price paid for the object, not only to the true value of the object. The issue is then addressed of whether or not the transaction is null, or whether the purchaser may return the amount by which he had defrauded the merchant and keep the object. So the issue of retraction is made complicated. Third, we have a discussion of a change in the market value of the object prior to the completion of the transaction: “if one sold an object worth five for six, but did not complete the transaction before the market-price of the object went up to seven, so that the purchaser, who had been subject to fraud, now wishes to complete the purchase, what is the rule? Here again, we see how the Talmud clarifies the received rule, but in no way wishes to expand, or contract, or revise, the category that is realized in detail by the rule.
So far as the Mishnah sets forth the conception of wealth, we find the phenomenon the same: the Yerushalmi receives with respect and restates with precision and accuracy precisely what the Mishnah’s authorship has said, without expanding, redesigning, let alone redefining that conception in any material way. The conception of wealth as fixed and unchanging is associated with the prohibition, deriving from Scripture, against what is narrowly translated as interest or increase (Mishnah-tractate Baba Mesia 5:1A), but what is in fact nothing other than profit of more than 18% of the true value of the object, on the one side, or interest on a loan of any kind, on the other. Trading in naked futures, for example, is forbidden; it involves transactions concerning things that are not now in being. The prohibition against profit or interest on loans is extended to gifts in kind or even generous gestures or attitudes. How is the rule worked out in the Yerushalmi? First, may the judges exact usurious interest from one who has received it? The answer is this: “If from this man you exact what he has unlawfully gained, then we shall leave not a thing in the estates of the great nobles of the Land of Israel” (Y.B.M. 5:1.IC). But bonds containing interest-clauses are unenforceable in court.
The language of the Mishnah is clarified and details left open by the Mishnah-paragraph’s language are filled in. A case involving interest in kind—free rent—is worked out: “A man lent money to his fellow. The latter let him space in his building. Later on the borrower said to the lender, ‘Pay me rent for my building.’ The lender said to him, ‘Give me back my money. [I had assumed you would not charge me rent so long as my money was in your hands.]’ The case came before R. Ba bar Mina, who ruled, ‘Now does the lender get what he had imagined was free [merely because he had assumed it was free? Obviously not. He was wrong and has no claim on free rent at all.]’” The case is further expanded, but the character of the discussion is entirely clear.
The upshot is obvious. The Yerushalmi’s reading of the Mishnah’s important discussions of economics is faithful in reproducing and clarifying and complementing the received rules. But the powerful abstraction of the Mishnah’s intellectual method, stating in detail general principles of an encompassing character, finds no counterpart. The Mishnah’s statements in general are treated not as concrete expressions of abstract principles but rather mere cases and rules. So the document’s basic philosophicality is subverted, its economics as an exercise in theory capable of holding its own with Aristotle is turned into mere rules. What that means is simple: whatever the Yerushalmi and its companion-documents wished to say would come to expression in ways that did not involve the sustained reconsideration of problems of economic theory. What we see with great clarity, therefore, is that the Mishnah’s heirs have faithfully preserved their inheritance without taking over its categorical structure and system. They paid all due respect to the inherited system, while—as Chapter Five will show us—at the same time constructing their own counterpart-system, with its counterpart-categories.
These emerge in free-standing, not-exegetical passages, compositions framed outside the orbit of the Mishnah. In those passages, it quickly becomes clear, the received economics is simply bypassed. Where we find extensive passages in which the Mishnah is left far behind, they normally are of two kinds: (1) exegesis of narrative or theological passages of Scripture, and (2) fables about heroes. These latter are divided into tales about rabbis and historical accounts. But no important distinction exists between the two, except that the former speaks of what rabbis said and did while the latter tells about events on a more generous scale. Accordingly, when the Yerushalmi presents us with ideas or expressions of a world related to, but fundamentally separate from, that of the Mishnah, that is, when the Yerushalmi wishes to say something other than what the Mishnah says and means, it will take up one of two modes of discourse. Either we find exegesis of biblical passages, with the value system of the rabbis read into the scriptural tales, or we are told stories about holy men and paradigmatic events, once again through tales told in such a way that a didactic purpose is served.20 And in such passages, there is no economics in the received and conventional sense.
A case in which wealth is made contingent, so that the outsider’s high valuation of money is contrasted with the Israelite’s low valuation of money and his high valuation of holiness:
GENESIS RABBAH XI:IV
4. A. |
Said R. Tanhuma, “There was a case in Rome that took place on the eve of the great fast [the Day of Atonement]. A certain tailor there went to buy himself a fish, and it happened that the governor’s bondman was bidding for it too, and one bid for such and so, and the other bid for such and so, until the price reached twelve denars. And the tailor got it. |
B. |
“At dinner the governor said to his servant, ‘Why did you not serve fish?’ |
C. |
“He said to him, ‘My lord, why should I keep the matter from you? Such and so a certain Jew did to me. Do you want me to bring you a fish that cost twelve denars?’ |
D. |
“He said to him, ‘Who is he?’ |
E. |
“He said to him, ‘Such and so, a Jew.’ |
F. |
“He sent for him and summoned him, and he came. He said, ‘Will a Jewish tailor eat a fish for twelve denars?’ |
G. |
“He said to him, ‘My lord, we have a day which effects atonement for us for all of the sins of the year, and should we not treasure it?’ |
H. |
“He brought proof for his statement, and the governor let him go free.” |
What is important from our perspective is the contrast that is drawn between the incorrect and the correct evaluation of wealth. The gentile does not know what counts, the Israelite does. Then by scarce resources, in the passage at hand and countless counterparts, something other than gold is meant.
The polemic against wealth and comfort and in favor of a different value altogether is exemplified in the notion that the generation of the flood sinned because it had too much prosperity:
GENESIS RABBAH XXXIV:XI.2
Humankind had rebelled under conditions of prosperity, so now they will have to endure “hot and cold,” “seedtime and harvesttime,” interpreted as misfortunes. Lust for money is condemned in countless ways, for people are supposed to place their trust not in real estate or movables or other things of material value at all.
So far as the issues of economics arise in the Yerushalmi, they invariably are introduced by the requirement of dealing with sentences of the Mishnah, and they are fully spelled out. But is there independent thinking about the same issues? A survey of the tractates of the Yerushalmi fails to yield a single important case in which the kinds of writing particular to the Yerushalmi vis à vis the Mishnah produce any thought at all on economic topics. Quite to the contrary, in those other-than-exegetical passages of the Yerushalmi we find ourselves in a world in which no one is thinking about the kinds of scarce resources and their rational utilization, protection, and increase, that economics considers. To state the fact very simply: in the successor-documents, scarce resources, so far as these are of a material order of being, e.g., wealth defined as the Mishnah and Aristotle did, true value understood as philosophy defined it, the matter of profit and increase and market-economics and the rest—all of these simply are systemically neutral in the successor documents. Where wealth, money, trading, and profit enter discourse at all, they are not part of a system that expresses its basic structure through the category of economics. They are trivialized and made to exemplify categories of a different system altogether.
To demonstrate that fact, we turn to some examples of how in the companion-writings issues of market and wealth are treated. What we see, time and again, is the simple fact that these matters, systemically uncontingent, independent variables in the Mishnah’s structure, are explicitly treated as contingent and dependent. In explaining the fight between Cain and Abel, one version has the argument concern the relative merit of real estate as against movables. But another restates the matter entirely, so R. Joshua of Sikhnin in the name of R. Levi: “Both of them took the real estate of the world, and both of them took the movables. Then what was the quarrel about? This one said, ‘In my domain will the house of the sanctuary be built,’ and that one said, ‘In my domain.’ ‘And when they were in the field’ (Gen. 4:8) [indicates it, for] the word ‘field’ can refer only to the house of the sanctuary, as it is said, ‘Zion shall be ploughed as a field’ (Micah 3:12). And, as matters played themselves out: ‘Cain rose up against his brother Abel and killed him’ (Gen. 4:8).”21 The basic conviction of the biblical story, that at issue was Cain’s jealousy of Abel, because God had favored Abel, is curiously absent in all three explanations. The first theory of the dispute is that it concerned material things, the second, that it concerned the sacred service, the third, that it concerned who will possess woman. If we substitute for the possession of the house of the sanctuary the prestige accruing to the one who holds possession of that domain, then at issue in the mind of the compositor of the whole is wealth, prestige, and sex. God’s favor of one brother because of his superior offering, as against the other because of his niggardly one, then falls away from the story, which turns into an account of human greed, arrogance, and lust. From our viewpoint, what is interesting is simple. Real estate and movables are not to be prized; these do not represent wealth. They are contingent and dependent. Not only does wealth not take the form of land or movables, but prosperity is a source of sin.22
Pisqa Ten of Pesiqta deRab Kahana, which deals with tithing, makes the polemic against wealth explicit. Its base-verse is Deut. 14:22. In this connection, at Pesiqta deRab Kahana X:I.4, we find a very precise treatment of a principal concern of economics, which is proper estate-management. Xenophon would not have made much sense of the following:
The message cannot be missed: obedience to the law of the Torah yields prosperity, and violation, want. The sarcasm of the relatives underlines the main point. What the householder prized he lost. His father had left the right message: obedience to God, giving God the proper share of the jointly-owned property, will assure prosperity. That point is made explicitly at Pesiqta deRab Kahana XI:X.1.B-C: “. . . tithing, you shall tithe—so that you will get rich. Said the Holy One, blessed be he, ‘Give a tithe of what is mine, and I shall enrich what is yours.’”
These and other stories, which occur in numbers, show that in place of one rationality, that of careful management and increase of scarce resources, another rationality, that of a transcendent sort, has come into place. That other rationality will place a high value on matters of an other-than-material character, e.g., Leviticus Rabbah III:V presents stories on the high worth of the poor man, the poor man’s offering, widow’s meal offering and like. These tales present no important economic insight of course, but contrast worldly value with real value. Indeed, when we examine sustained discussions of sin and venality, such as we find at Leviticus Rabbah XVI:I, we find that sins of a material order are rarely at issue. The entire matter of scarce resources is omitted in numerous moral passages.
Sayings and stories of this type are commonplace in systems that lack all interest in economics. No early Christian writer would have found alien the denigration of wealth and the identification of value in something of an other-than-material classification, such as is expressed in the documents of the fourth and fifth centuries. Instead of carrying forward systematic thought on a system of economics let alone a system that makes a statement through economics, they present episodic and trivial observation on economic topics, making points hardly pertinent at all to economics as a sustained and systematic field of thought.
Then what takes the place of those scarce resources that form the critical interest of philosophical economics? A clear statement of the answer is as follows, which shows explicitly that utterly new rationality as to the definition of value and wealth that would emerge in the successor-system:
LEVITICUS RABBAH XXXIV:XVI
1. B. |
R. Tarfon gave to R. Aqiba six silver centenarii, saying to him, “Go, buy us a piece of land, so we can get a living from it and labor in the study of Torah together.” |
C. |
He took the money and handed it over to scribes, Mishnah-teachers, and those who study Torah. |
D. |
After some time R. Tarfon met him and said to him, “Did you buy the land that I mentioned to you?” |
E. |
He said to him, “Yes.” |
F. |
He said to him, “Is it any good?” |
G. |
He said to him, “Yes.” |
H. |
He said to him, “And do you not want to show it to me?” |
I. |
He took him and showed him the scribes, Mishnah teachers, and people who were studying Torah, and the Torah that they had acquired. |
J. |
He said to him, “Is there anyone who works for nothing? Where is the deed covering the field?” |
K. |
He said to him, “It is with King David, concerning whom it is written, ‘He has scattered, he has given to the poor, his righteousness endures forever’ (Ps. 112:9).” |
It would be difficult to invent more explicit proof that a drastic shift has taken place. Instead of defining wealth as land, land is defined as not-wealth, and something else is now defined as wealth in its place.
That is evidence of not the reformation of received categories but the formation of new ones, not continuous with the old. And the representation of matters is quite articulated in the contrast between wealth as real estate and wealth as Torah. Then how do we turn real estate into Torah? That transvaluation of values is worked out, once more quite explicitly, in the statement (Y. Megillah 4:1.IV.P:
P. |
“‘I can write the whole Torah for two hundred copper coins.’ What did he do, he went and bought flax seed worth two hundred copper coins, sowed it, reaped it, made it into ropes, caught a deer, and wrote the entire Torah on the deer hide.” |
The three operative components here are money, land, and Torah. As we recall, the definition of real wealth was real estate. So we transform money into land. But then the definition of wealth is shifted, and the symbolic shift is blatant: turn money into real wealth, then real wealth produces the wherewithal of making a Torah. And with that rather stunning symbolic transformation, we find ourselves in a world wholly different from the one in which scarce resources are identified with matters of material, palpable value, and in which economics is the theory of the rational disposition of scarce resources of capital, labor, movables, real estate, and the like.
What we see therefore is not the revision, let alone the expansion, of a received category, but adumbrations of the transformation of the category into a counterpart-category, one that systemically addresses the same issue but presents a mirror-image of the received category’s meanings and doctrines. How does the received economics change as a continuing category? In my view, the received economics does not undergo categorical revision at all. Have we found, beyond the valuation of land, the conception of true value, and other traits of Aristotelian economics, appreciation of other media of material wealth and value, e.g., market place, capital, and the like? I think not.
I can identify in the documents under examination no new thinking on economic questions at all. For instance, I can locate no interest in the market, in production of goods and services, in addition to produce of land, such as would signify reflection on the limitations of philosophical economics and the expansion of the range of concern beyond the theoretically-constricted limits of the Mishnah’s economics. There simply is no new thinking on economics. Instead, as we shall see in due course, a new “scarce resource” essentially beyond the limits of the old, that is, a supernatural resource, defined a category, and a new rationality superseded the received one. But before following the new, let us examine the third component of the initial system, its politics. Here too we shall see that dual process of amplification of the literary expression of the given system and also the utter reformulation of its category-formation.
1But not all systems work out an economics or require one. A system will address the rationality required for the disposition of scarce resources when, and only when, a systemic message may be set forth through the exemplification (or even specification) of that rationality. No Christianity developed an economics of systemic consequence prior to the medieval Christian encounter with Aristotle. And one of the marks of the Aristotelian character of the Mishnah’s economics, as we see in this chapter, is its forthright utilization of economics in the formation and expression of its systemic message, and in the point-by-point replication of Aristotle’s particular doctrines in the composition of that economics. I think the basic reason, as with politics, is that the Mishnah’s framers took for granted their “Israel” formed not merely an ethnic group or a religious community (our terms, not theirs) but a nation living on its land; the enlandisement of their system necessitated address to the rational disposition of scarce resources, defined, as a matter of fact, as real estate; and the givenness of the nationhood of their system’s social entity led them to reflect on the legitimate uses of violence. They took for granted theirs was an empowered social entity. Only in the Diaspora do Judaic systems bypass economics and politics as media for the making of the system’s larger statement, even though episodic sayings on economic action (e.g., in ethics) or on politics (in a supernatural context ordinarily) do make their appearance here and there. The fundamental criterion for sorting out Judaisms must be, then, enlandised and empowered or not; all systems must fall on one side or another of that line. If the hypothesis just now suggested is sound, then no Judaism-Judaism should resort to economics or politics as principal systemic components. The shift we shall trace in Part II then is not so odd, because while located in the Land of Israel, the framers had entered a period in which their Israel no longer governed within the Land, let alone overseas, and furthermore progressively was losing command of the real estate of what they called the Land of Israel to Christians, who called the same territory Palestine. The successor-system’s utter reversal of the conventional meanings of politics and economics forms a response, of a kind, to that worldly transformation of the Jews’ economic and political circumstances. The really interesting question lies elsewhere: the Talmud of Babylonia and related writings and whether and how the system to which they attest yields the stigmata of disenlandisement and disempowerment. If it does not, then the criterion of provenance in the Land of Israel does not serve so decisively as, at the present, it seems to me to.
2For instance, history defined an important, systemically critical, category for Augustine, economics did not.
3And, as we shall see in Chapter Three, the Mishnah’s politics is worked out along lines entirely congruent to those dictated by Aristotle’s mode of political theory.
4For Plato the issue was episodic and bore no important systemic message; for Christian thinkers, economics makes its first consequential appearance in medieval times, with the renewal of Aristotelianism.
5My argument should be clarified here. I do not mean to suggest that all systems to be systemic require an economics; nor do I propose that any philosophical system lacking an economics is not philosophical. My task in this part of the book is to demonstrate that the Mishnah’s is a distinctively philosophical system, and I have taken as my evidence the demonstration that its system is congruent in method and composition (and, as a matter of fact, here and in the next chapter, in doctrine as well) to a system everyone concedes to be philosophical, which is Aristotle’s. So not all systems require an economics, and not all philosophies require an economics, but when the Mishnah’s system presents its economics, it shows itself to be in structure congruent with Aristotle’s, and, as it happens, what the Mishnah’s economics says is the same that, and for the same purpose, that Aristotle’s economics says. And that proves, in this context, the philosophical character of the Mishnah’s system.
6Polanyi, “Aristotle Discovers the Economy,” in Polanyi, Karl, Conrad M. Arensberg, and Harry W. Pearson, Trade and Market in the Early Empires. Economies in History and Theory (Glencoe, 1957: Free Press), p. 79.
7Davisson and Harper, European Economic History, p. 130.
8Ibid., p. 131.
9A basic point in common should be noted. Both Aristotle and the Mishnah composed economic theories that defied the economics of their own day. In each case a version of the then-anachronistic theory of distributive economics was made to bear the burden of the systemic message, while market-economics was accorded only a subordinated place within the larger theoretical structure. Market economics, coming into being in Greece in the very period—the sixth century B.C.—in which the Priestly Code was composed. Aristotle theorized about an economics entirely beyond anyone’s ken and stated as principle the values of an economics (and a social system, too) long since transcended. Market economics, moreover, had been conveyed in practice to the Middle East a century and a half or so later by Alexander. By the time of the Mishnah, seven centuries after the Pentateuch was closed, market economics was well established as the economics of the world economy in which, as a matter of fact, the land of Israel and Israel, that is, the Jews of Palestine, had been fully incorporated.
10Though, as we shall see in Chapter Three, the politics of the Mishnah was disembedded from its economics, while the politics of Aristotle was embedded, so that the latter presents a political economy, the former does not.
11I do not claim to grasp the meaning of “true value.”
12Polanyi, “Aristotle Discovers the Economy,” p. 79.
13Polanyi, p. 88.
14Polanyi, p. 90. Also Karl Polanyi, The Livelihood of Man, ed. by Harry W. Pearson (N. Y., 1977: Academic Press), see in particular pp. 145-276.
15The borders of the Land of Israel were notoriously difficult to specify; they did not coincide with any political boundaries to which we can now point. In general, what was meant by “the Land of Israel” seems to me to have been, land settled and held by the immigrants in the time of Joshua, on the one side, and those in the time of the return to Zion, on the other, with former real estate more deeply sanctified, more fully comprising land of the Land of Israel, than the latter. So the holiness of the holy land depended upon the joint ownership of that particular property between God and (an) Israeli(ite), and the longer the Israelite held the land, the holier the land became. So the holy land is not an absolute, geographical fact, but a relative, (in our terms) social one. Israelites outside of the Land of Israel did not impart holiness to the land on which they lived, and gentiles within the Land of Israel also did not impart holiness to the land on which they lived. And all real estate outside of the Land of Israel was held to be cultically unclean in the level of corpse-uncleanness, than which there is no more virulent source of uncleanness. So the entire matter of “land as wealth,” or “land is the only form of wealth,” which was an absolute commonplace in ancient economics, has to be recast in the context of (a) Judaism. There are numerous details of the law that rest on precisely that supposition. Then Israelites living on land nearby, e.g., in Syria, imparted to that land holiness as well, though less holiness inhered in that land than in land in the Land of Israel occupied by Israelites. So from the viewpoint of the system, not surprisingly, the land is in gradations, that is to say, it is both classified and also hierarchized. That hierarchical classification seems to me yet another striking piece of evidence for the philosophical character that permeates the Mishnah’s system; it is surely a conception of which the Priestly authors of Leviticus and Numbers, after 500, were entirely oblivious. But it is critical to the problematic of a variety of legal discussions in the Mishnah.
16And that must govern our definition of wealth when we follow the expansion of the category at hand, that is, rational disposition of scarce resources. When we speak presently of scarcely resources of another type, we will not identify virtue as a scarce resource in the way in which land is a scarce resource, but we will identify, in Chapter Five, scarce resources that produce worldly comfort and ease and other benefit, as valuable as land, as desired as gold, as productive as a vineyard or a field; and that may prove “spiritual” or “immaterial” or “metaphorical,” but systemically wealth throughout is understand as palpable and real and consequential for the material well-being of the owner of wealth in that form. I cannot overemphasize the danger of our assuming that wealth is either material or spiritual; in this system’s secondary phase, there is wealth that is entirely palpable and produces precisely the same good life that owning fields and villages does, but it is not wealth in real estate at all, and, all the more so, assuredly not wealth in the form of liquid capital. I think no form of wealth identified by us proved so incomprehensible to the system-builders before us as capital.
17It remains to stress that the Yerushalmi’s exegetes of the Mishnah brought to the document no distinctive program of their own. I perceive no hidden agenda. To state matters negatively, the exegetes did not know in advance of their approach to a law of the Mishnah facts about the passage not contained (at least implicitly) within the boundaries of the language of the Mishnah passage itself (except only for facts contained within other units of the same document). Rejecting propositions that were essentially a priori, they proposed to explain and expand precisely the wording and the conceptions supplied by the document under study. I cannot point to a single instance in which the Yerushalmi’s exegetes in retrospect appear to twist and turn the language and message of a passage, attempting to make the words mean something other than what they appear to say. Whether the exegetical results remain close to the wording of a passage of the Mishnah, or whether they leap beyond the bounds of the passage, the upshot is the same. There is no exegetical program revealed in the Yerushalmi’s reading of the Mishnah other than that defined, to begin with, by the language and conceptions of one Mishnah passage or another.
18These four taxa encompass all the Yerushalmi’s units of discourse that relate to the Mishnah at all, 90% of the whole of the Yerushalmi tractates surveyed in my Talmud of the Land of Israel. A Preliminary Translation and Explanation. 35. Introduction: Taxonomy.
19Briefly let me amplify the matter of how the Yerushalmi proposes to provide a systematic exegesis of selected passages of the Mishnah. I review a taxonomy of these exegeses. What are the sorts of approaches we are apt to find? These are four, of which two are nearly indistinguishable, the third highly distinctive, and the fourth barely consequential. 1. Citation and gloss of the language of the Mishnah (meaning of a phrase or concrete illustration of a rule). A unit of discourse of this type will contain a direct citation of a sentence of the Mishnah. The word choices or phrasing of the Mishnah will be paraphrased or otherwise explained through what is essentially a gloss. Or the rule of the Mishnah will be explained through an example or a restatement of some kind. 2. Specification of the meaning of the law of the Mishnah or the reason for it. Items of this type stand very close to those of the former. What differentiates the one from the other is the absence, in the present set of units of discourse, of direct citation of the Mishnah or close and explicit reading of its language. The discussion then tends to allude to the Mishnah or to generalize, while remaining wholly within its framework. In some units of discourse scriptural proof texts are adduced in evidence of a Mishnah passage. These frequently spill over into discussion of the reason for a rule. 3. Secondary implication or application of the law of the Mishnah. Units of discourse of this catalog generalize beyond the specific rule of the Mishnah. The discussion will commonly restate the principle of the rule at hand or raise a question invited by it. Hence if the Mishnah’s law settles one question, participants in this type of discourse will use that as the foundation for raising a second and consequent question. Two or more rules of the Mishnah (or of the Mishnah and Tosefta) will be contrasted with one another and then harmonized, or two or more rulings of a specific authority will be alleged to conflict and then shown not to stand at variance with one another. 4. The matter of authorities and their views: case law. In a handful of items, concrete decisions are attached to specific laws of the Mishnah, or the harmonization or identification of the opinions of Mishnah’s authorities forms the center of interest. From this taxonomy it follows that there was a severely circumscribed repertoire of intellectual initiatives available to the authorities of the Yerushalmi. Approaching a given rule of the Mishnah, a sage would do one of two things: (1) explain the meaning of the passage, or (2) extend and expand the meaning of the passage. In the former category fall all the items in the first and second approaches, as well as those units of discourse in which either a scriptural proof text is adduced in support of a law or an alleged variant reading of a text is supplied. In the latter category fit all items in the third and fourth approaches, as well as those in which the work is to harmonize laws or principles, on the one side, or to cite and amplify Tosefta’s complement to the Mishnah passage, on the other. Within these two categories, which produce, in all, four subdivisions, we may find a place for all units of discourse in which the focus of discussion is a passage of the Mishnah. Of the two sorts, the work of straightforward explanation of the plain meaning of a law of the Mishnah by far predominates. If we may state the outcome very simply: what the framers of the Yerushalmi want to say—whatever else their purpose or aspiration—is what they think the Mishnah means in any given passage.
20 Then when does the Yerushalmi speak for itself, not for the Mishnah? If we collect all units of discourse, or larger parts of such units, in which exegesis of the Mishnah or expansion upon the law of the Mishnah is absent—about 10% of all the Yerushalmi’s units of discourse in my probe—we find at most four types, which in fact are only two. 1. Theoretical questions of law not associated with a particular passage of the Mishnah. Some tendency exists to move beyond the legal boundaries set by the Mishnah’s rules themselves. More general inquiries are taken up. These of course remain within the framework of the topic of one tractate or another, although some larger modes of thought are characteristic of more than a single tractate. To explain, I point to the mode of thought in which the scriptural basis of the law of the Mishnah will be investigated, without regard to a given tractate. Along these same lines, I may point to a general inquiry into the count under which one may be liable for a given act, comments on the law governing teaching and judging cases, and the like. But these items tend not to leave the Mishnah far behind. 2. Exegesis of Scripture separate from the Mishnah. It is under this rubric that we find the most important instances in which the Yerushalmi presents materials essentially independent of the Mishnah. They pursue problems or themes through what is said about a biblical figure, expressing ideas and values simply unknown to the Mishnah. 3. Historical statements. The Yerushalmi contains a fair number of statements that something happened or narratives about how something happened. While many of these are replete with biblical quotations, in general they do not provide exegesis of Scripture, which serves merely as illustration or reference point. 4. Stories about, and rules for, sages and disciples, separate from discussion of a passage of the Mishnah. The Mishnah contains a tiny number of tales about rabbis. These serve principally as precedents for, or illustrations of, rules. The Yerushalmi, by contrast, contains a sizable number of stories about sages and their relationships to other people. Like the items in the second and third lists, these too may be adduced as evidence of the values of the people who stand behind the Yerushalmi, the things they thought important. These tales rarely serve to illustrate a rule or concept of the Mishnah. The main, though not the only, characteristic theme is the power of the rabbi, the honor due to the rabbi, and the tension between the rabbi and others, whether the patriarch, on the one side, the heretic on the second, or the gentile on the third. Units of discourse (or large segments of such units) independent of the interests of the Mishnah are not numerous. Varying in bulk from one tractate to the next, as I said, in my probe of five tractates of the Yerushalmi they added up to not much more than 10% of the whole. Furthermore, among the four types of units of discourse before us, the items on the first do not move far from the principles and concerns of the Mishnah.
21Gen Rabbah XII:VII.2.
22See Chapter Two for further illustrations of that position.