The Mishnah or the Mishna is the first written collection of the Jewish oral traditions that are known as the Oral Torah. It is also the first work of rabbinic literature, with the oldest surviving material dating to the 6th to 7th centuries BCE.
The Sanhedrin was a legislative and judicial assembly of either 23 or 71 elders, existing at both a local and central level in the ancient Land of Israel.
The Jerusalem Talmud or Palestinian Talmud, also known as the Talmud of the Land of Israel, is a collection of rabbinic notes on the second-century Jewish oral tradition known as the Mishnah. Naming this version of the Talmud after Palestine or the Land of Israel—rather than Jerusalem—is considered more accurate, as the text originated mainly from Galilee in Byzantine Palaestina Secunda rather than from Jerusalem, where no Jews lived at the time.
The sabbath year, also called the sabbatical year or shǝvi'it, or "Sabbath of The Land", is the seventh year of the seven-year agricultural cycle mandated by the Torah in the Land of Israel and is observed in Judaism.
Capital punishment in traditional Jewish law has been defined in Codes of Jewish law dating back to medieval times, based on a system of oral laws contained in the Babylonian and Jerusalem Talmud, the primary source being the Hebrew Bible. In traditional Jewish law there are four types of capital punishment: a) stoning, b) burning by ingesting molten lead, c) strangling, and d) beheading, each being the punishment for specific offenses. Except in special cases where a king can issue the death penalty, capital punishment in Jewish law cannot be decreed upon a person unless there were a minimum of twenty-three judges (Sanhedrin) adjudicating in that person's trial who, by a majority vote, gave the death sentence, and where there had been at least two competent witnesses who testified before the court that they had seen the litigant commit the offense. Even so, capital punishment does not begin in Jewish law until the court adjudicating in this case had issued the death sentence from a specific place on the Temple Mount in the city of Jerusalem.
Modern attempts to revive the Sanhedrin are the efforts from 1538 until the present day to renew the Sanhedrin, which was the high court and legislative authority for Jews in ancient times. The Sanhedrin was originally dissolved in 358 by the edict of the Roman emperor Constantius II.
Milḥemet mitzvah or in Tiberian Hebrew milḥemeth miṣwah is the term for a war during the times of the Tanakh when a king would go to war in order to fulfill something based on, and required by, the Torah without needing approval from a Sanhedrin, such as war against Amalek, or the seven nations of Canaan. In contrast, a milkhemet reshut is a discretionary war, which according to Jewish law requires the permission of a Sanhedrin.
The tithe is specifically mentioned in the Books of Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. The tithe system was organized in a seven-year cycle, the seventh-year corresponding to the Shemittah-cycle in which year tithes were broken-off, and in every third and sixth-year of this cycle the second tithe replaced with the poor man's tithe. These tithes were akin to taxes for the people of Israel and were mandatory, not optional giving. This tithe was distributed locally "within thy gates" to support the Levites and assist the poor. Every year, Bikkurim, terumah, ma'aser rishon and terumat ma'aser were separated from the grain, wine and oil. Initially, the commandment to separate tithes from one's produce only applied when the entire nation of Israel had settled in the Land of Israel. The Returnees from the Babylonian exile who had resettled the country were a Jewish minority, and who, although they were not obligated to tithe their produce, put themselves under a voluntary bind to do so, and which practice became obligatory upon all.
The House of Hillel and House of Shammai were, among Jewish scholars, two schools of thought during the period of tannaim, named after the sages Hillel and Shammai who founded them. These two schools had vigorous debates on matters of ritual practice, ethics, and theology which were critical for the shaping of the Oral Law and Judaism as it is today.
Beginning in October 2004, an attempt was made to re-establish a revived Sanhedrin, a national rabbinical court of Jewish law in Israel. The organization heading this attempt referred to itself as the nascent Sanhedrin or developing Sanhedrin, and regarded itself as a provisional body awaiting integration into the Israeli government as both a supreme court and an upper house of the Knesset. The Israeli secular press regards it as an illegitimate fundamentalist organization of rabbis. The organization, which was composed of over 70 rabbis, claimed to enjoy recognition and support from the entire religious Jewish community in Israel. However, it was mostly ignored by the Haredi community, and stirred debate in both religious and secularist circles. There has not been a "full meeting" of the Sanhedrin since 2005 and its leader resigned in 2008. Haredi Zionist rabbis involved in the Sanhedrin revival attempt included Yisrael Ariel and Yoel Schwartz.
Kil'ayim are the prohibitions in Jewish law which proscribe the planting of certain mixtures of seeds, grafting, the mixing of plants in vineyards, the crossbreeding of animals, the formation of a team in which different kinds of animals work together, and the mixing of wool with linen in garments.
Impurity of the land of the nations is a rabbinic edict stipulating a specified degree of tumah (impurity) on all lands outside the Land of Israel. The demarcation lines of foreign lands effectually included all those lands not settled by the people of Israel during their return from the Babylonian exile during the Second Temple period, and was meant to dissuade the priests of Aaron's lineage from venturing beyond the Land of Israel where graves were unmarked, and who may inadvertently contract corpse uncleanness and thereby eat their bread-offering (Terumah), unawares, in a state of ritual impurity and becoming liable thereby to kareth. The declaration with respect to foreign lands includes also the "virgin soil" of those lands, and was, therefore, a safeguard meant to prevent the priests from inadvertently transgressing the Law of Moses.
Dina d'malkhuta dina is a principle in Jewish religious law that the civil law of the country is binding upon the Jewish inhabitants of that country, and, in certain cases, is to be preferred to Jewish law. The concept of dina de-malkhuta dina is similar to the concept of conflict of laws in other legal systems. It appears in at least twenty-five places in the Shulchan Arukh.
Demai is a Halakhic term meaning "doubtful". The demai status applies to agricultural produce acquired from common people who are suspected of not correctly separating tithes according to Jewish law. As a result, one who acquires demai produce must separate some of the tithes himself, in case this was not done earlier.
Sicaricon, lit. 'usurping occupant; possessor of confiscated property; the law concerning the purchase of confiscated property', refers in Jewish law to a former act and counter-measure meant to deal effectively with religious persecution against Jews in which the Roman government had permitted its own citizens to seize the property of Jewish landowners who were either absent or killed in war, or taken captive, or else where Roman citizens had received property that had been confiscated by the state in the laws prescribed under ager publicus, and to which the original Jewish owners of such property had not incurred any legal debt or fine, but had simply been the victims of war and the illegal, governmental expropriation of such lands from their rightful owners or heirs. The original Jewish law, made at some time after the First Jewish-Roman War with Vespasian and his son Titus, saw additional amendments by later rabbinic courts, all of which were meant to safe-guard against depriving the original landowners and their heirs of any land that belonged to them, and to ensure their ability to redeem such property in the future.
Relative hour, sometimes called halachic hour, temporal hour, seasonal hour and variable hour, is a term used in rabbinic Jewish law that assigns 12 hours to each day and 12 hours to each night, all throughout the year. A relative hour has no fixed length in absolute time, but changes with the length of daylight each day - depending on summer, and in winter. Even so, in all seasons a day is always divided into 12 hours, and a night is always divided into 12 hours, which invariably makes for a longer hour or a shorter hour. At Mediterranean latitude, one hour can be about 45 minutes at the winter solstice, and 75 minutes at summer solstice. All of the hours mentioned by the Sages in either the Mishnah or Talmud, or in other rabbinic writings, refer strictly to relative hours.
Biblical mile is a unit of distance on land, or linear measure, principally used by Jews during the Herodian dynasty to ascertain distances between cities and to mark the Sabbath limit, equivalent to about ⅔ of an English statute mile, or what was about four furlongs. The basic Jewish traditional unit of distance was the cubit, each cubit being roughly between 46–60 centimetres (18–24 in) The standard measurement of the biblical mile, or what is sometimes called tǝḥūm šabbat, was 2,000 cubits.
Corpse uncleanness is a state of ritual uncleanness described in Jewish halachic law. It is the highest grade of uncleanness, or defilement, and is contracted by having either directly or indirectly touched, carried or shifted a dead human body, or after having entered a roofed house or chamber where the corpse of a Jew is lying.
Hefker beth-din hefker, "that which is declared by a court ownerless property is forthwith accounted ownerless property", is a principle in Jewish religious law that stipulates the right of a Jewish court of law in what regards jus in re aliena. The principle is derived from an episode in the Book of Ezra, where Ezra the Scribe commanded the Jewish people to return to their former country, threatening to confiscate the property of anyone who refuses to go-up to the Land of Israel, after having lived in exile.
Voluntary war, sometimes called a discretionary war, optional war, a non-obligatory war, or a war of free choice, is a technical term found in Hebrew classical literature and denoting a war that is waged of free choice by Israel, only at such a time when the people of Israel are settled in their ancestral homeland. Such a war cannot be waged without either the approbation of the Great Sanhedrin, consisting of no fewer than seventy-one judges, or, according to some authorities, without the command of a king.
