Specyfika języka religijnego Miszny

Abstract

Mishnah, which is the crux of Rabbinic Judaism, the essence of oral tradition called the Oral Torah, was written down in the Hebrew language in the late 2nd century A.D. However, before it was written down, it existed in oral traditions, which allowed people to better understand them, to bring the Torah’s laws up to date and to adjust them to changes in living conditions; however, it was also linked with a short form of orally transmitted traditions using specific templates, where important religious contents were put into stereotyped formulas and schemes, which came to be a characteristic feature of this language. Gradually, the greater the distance in time from its writing down, the more difficult it became for people to understand it due to inviolable language structures, which, from a present-day perspective, may create an impression – especially for beginners – which is the opposite of the one intended. That is to say, instead of facilitating the understanding of the Torah, the form of the message content makes it definitely more difficult. The language of the Mishnah is not an ordinary language, as it might seem, containing simple formulations which present ordinary things. It should be perceived as a specific variety of the Hebrew language of that time, which was used exclusively to express the most important religious contents. What then was the language in which Mishnah was written down? What is the peculiarity of the religious language of Mishnah? The author of this article is the Editor-in-Chief of the first Polish scholarly edition of Mishnah, which also contains the first Polish translation of this great Book of Talmudic Judaism.