Not Bread Alone: The Emerging Sense of Systematicity in Mishnah Hallah and Related Texts

This dissertation examines the difference between pre-rabbinic and rabbinic legal writing and attempts to characterize that difference. More generally, it is concerned with what makes rabbinic legal writing law per se. Beginning with the system of common law as a heuristic model for thinking about rabbinic texts as legal, it argues that a key aspect of this difference is systematicity: the rabbis consider the laws as interconnected parts of a whole, identifying the literary phenomenon of intersecting topics from legal domains as key evidence for this systematicity. This phenomenon both reflects and engenders the sense that the laws interact with one another across these domains. Taking the dough offering from Num 15:17–21 as a case study, it analyzes the pre-rabbinic reception of this law as a basis for comparison with the rabbinic texts. Close reading and redactional analysis of a wide swath of material from Mishnah and Tosefta Hallah and Sifre Num follows, mapping the systematicity that they evince and showing the impact of that systematicity on rabbinic legal thinking. The final chapter considers parallel Christian legal material as an additional comparandum for the rabbinic texts, and as examples of Christian legal reasoning, contributing to a nascent trend in early Christian studies.