The End of the Tannaitic Era: Tosefta and Baraitot

The Mishnah was a code, not an archive: Rebbi selected, condensed and discarded. An enormous body of teaching by the same sages remained outside it. Such a teaching is called a baraita—Aramaic for outside.

The largest such collection is the Tosefta, the supplement. It follows the same order of divisions and tractates but runs several times longer: where the Mishnah gives a terse rule, the Tosefta supplies a case, a dispute, an explanation. Tradition links it to Rabbi Chiya and Rabbi Oshaya, who worked immediately after Rebbi. The Talmud puts it bluntly: any baraita that did not pass through their school is corrupt, and no one relies on it.

The baraitot also include the halakhic midrashim—verse-by-verse readings of the Torah: the Mekhilta on Exodus, the Sifra on Leviticus, the Sifrei on Numbers and Deuteronomy—and the Baraita of Rabbi Yishmael, the thirteen rules of interpretation recited every morning at the start of prayer.

This generation is the last of the tannaim. Rabbi Chiya, Bar Kappara and Levi bar Sisi still belong to the older world; of Rav the Talmud says he is a tanna and may dispute. By then the border is crossed: one may no longer argue with tannaitic texts, only explain them. The era of the amoraim begins, and even the language changes, from Mishnaic Hebrew to Talmudic Aramaic.