: Günter Stemberger
: The Wisdom of the Fathers A Commentary on Tractate Avot
: Walter de Gruyter GmbH& Co.KG
: 9783111557281
: Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche WissenschaftISSN
: 1
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: Christentum
: English
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Tractate Avot of the Mishnah is generally dated in the third century and is considered the basic text of rabbinic Judaism. The present commentary proposes a critical re-evaluation of this position.

The commentary obviously tries to interpret the individual sayings of Avot as to their literary characteristics, their cultural context and their original meaning. But above all it tries to contextualize the tractate within rabbinic literature, to analyse its language/phraseology and to trace its earliest evidence and its use in later rabbinic literature. This approach will demonstrate that some sayings are well known even outside Avot already in the earliest rabbinic tradition, but that many other sayings do not reflect general rabbinic theology and seem to be almost unknown in rabbinic tradition before the late eighth century. This leads to the conclusion that only a kernel of the text existed already in the time of the Mishnah; its greater part grew in the following centuries. Only in the eighth century the tractate as we know it, reached its nearly final form and became soon popular due to the introduction of its text into the reading of the synagogue.

Text, Translation, and Commentary


Chapter 1


1:1משה קיבל תורה מסיני ומסרה ליהושע,ויהושע לזקנים,וזקנים לנביאים,ונביאים מסרוה לאנשי כנסת הגדולה.הם אמרו שלשה דברים:היו מתונין בדין.והעמידו תלמידים הרבה.ועשו סייג לתורה.

1:1 Moses received Torah from Sinai and passed it on to Joshua and Joshua to the elders, and the elders to the prophets. And the prophets passed it on to the Men of the Great Assembly.

They said three things: Be deliberate in judgment. And raise up many disciples. And make a fence for the Torah.1

Mishnah manuscripts refer to the tractate simply asAvot or “Tractate Avot” (massekhet Avot: MS Parma,massekhta de-Avot: MS Lowe). Many prayer books use the title “Chapters of the Fathers” (Pirqe Avot) and place in front of its text a passage from mSan 10:1 in the traditional enlarged wording (the whole passage is missing in MS Kaufmann): “All Israel have a part in the world to come, as it is said: ‘Your people shall all be righteous; they shall possess the land forever. They are the shoot that I planted, the work of my hands, so that I might be glorified’ (Isa 60:21).”

Moses received Torah from Sinai (משה קיבל תורה מסיני): The tractate opens with a statement about the origins of Torah. Torah appears without an article, implying that it is not referring to the Torah in the narrow meaning of the word, namely the five books of Moses, the Pentateuch, or even to the Hebrew Bible as a whole, also called Torah. Rather, as used here, the term “Torah” encompasses both the written and the oral Torah (the technical termתורה שבעל פה is not commonly found in tannaitic texts), an early rabbinic idea that later became dominant, but which is found explicitly only once in the tannaitic period: “Two Torot were given to Israel, one oral and one written” (SifDev 351, F. 480:שתי תורות ניתנו להם לישראל,אחד על פה ואחד בכתב).2

The phraseקיבל תורה is here understood as “received Torah.” This is different from its common understanding in early rabbinic literature. The only other occurrence of the phrase in the Mishnah outside of Avot speaks of the high priest who during the Yom Kippu