Q&A: A Question About “The Tanna Taught and Omitted”
A Question About “The Tanna Taught and Omitted”
Question
Hello and blessings,
I am currently learning tractate Kiddushin, and last week on pages 16a–16b I came across the concept of “the tanna taught and omitted.” I had trouble understanding why and what the logic is in the fact that the tanna would do this, and I asked one of the rabbis in the yeshiva and discussed it with him, until he told me to turn to you. So I wanted to ask the Rabbi whether he could look into my question.
-What I don’t understand is: what is the logic in the tanna omitting something in the Mishnah? After all, from where else could we know the law if it is not in the Mishnah of the Talmud? (I am working from the assumption that Rabbi Judah the Prince summarized all the Jewish laws of his time into the Mishnah in a wonderfully concise way [The Letter of Rav Sherira Gaon])
-And furthermore, why can one say “the tanna taught and omitted” only when he omitted two things or more, whereas one could instead say that he omitted even one thing if it belongs to a category, such as “things that have no fixed measure”?
-It is difficult to say that it is nevertheless possible to learn all these laws that the Talmud brings but that the Mishnah did not teach merely through close reading of the mishnayot. An example of this is on page 5a, where Rav Huna says that even a bridal canopy effects acquisition, and he makes a very long and complicated derivation, and Abaye answers against Rava, who challenges Rav Huna, that the Mishnah taught only things explicitly written in the Torah. But from which Mishnah is it possible to learn betrothal through a bridal canopy?
Thanks in advance
Answer
Hello,
First, I should preface by saying that I am not convinced that the Mishnah has wonderfully precise linguistic wording. The Talmud emends it with formulations like “something is missing here,” and the like, so it is דווקא more reasonable to think that the text is not perfectly exact.
As for your question, two possibilities can be suggested to explain the rule of “the tanna taught and omitted”: either there was some corruption in the text, or the tanna abbreviated his wording (remember that the mishnayot were transmitted orally, and brevity was important). If there was corruption, then it actually makes more sense to think there was one omission and not two, because two would be a greater textual corruption. But if the tanna abbreviated, then there is no point in shortening a whole list by one item. That is not a meaningful abbreviation, and then it would already make sense to write the entire list. Therefore the assumption is that at least two items were omitted.
As for your question of how we know the omitted laws, one should remember that there were other sources besides the Mishnah: baraitot, Tosefta collections, and midrashim, as well as oral tradition. The Mishnah is a summary accompanied by a tradition of interpretation and explanation. Therefore one can rely on the completion of the information from the oral tradition or from external sources. Beyond that, at least in some cases there is a source in the Mishnah or the Talmud for the law, but in the particular Mishnah under discussion it is not brought, and that is what is being asked. And sometimes the exceptional law is obvious by reasoning or is otherwise known, so it can be omitted for the sake of brevity.
For example, in the passage in Kiddushin 34a we learned: “One does not derive law from general rules, even in a case where it says ‘except.’” And see there the omission of women’s obligation in the public Torah-reading assembly of Hakhel (and other omissions as well; see there). In this case, I once explained in an article that it is obvious that women are obligated, because this is an obligation on the community and they are included in it. Women are exempt only from obligations on private individuals that are time-bound positive commandments. Perhaps that is why there was no need to include it in the list there.
Now I will prove to you that this is the situation in all the passages you encountered. It is always a case where the Talmud asks why the tanna did not write a certain law, and then answers that he omitted it. But in its question, how does the Talmud know that such a law exists if it does not appear in the Mishnah under discussion? Necessarily, it has another source for that law, and the question is only why the law does not appear in the Mishnah being discussed.
All the best,