The Mishnah organises the whole of Jewish practice into six orders, the sedarim, each gathering tractates on a broad area of life. Zeraim, seeds, opens with the laws of blessings and then treats agriculture in the Land of Israel, the tithes, the corner of the field left for the poor and the sabbatical year. Moed, appointed time, covers Shabbat and the festival calendar, from the intricate categories of forbidden Sabbath labour to the reading of the Scroll of Esther. Nashim, women, deals with betrothal, marriage contracts, divorce and vows. Nezikin, damages, is the civil and criminal code, and holds the courts, oaths and penalties, along with the atypical tractate Avot, a collection of ethical maxims rather than law.
Kodashim, holy things, preserves the procedures of the Temple sacrifices and the dietary rules of slaughter, recorded even though the Temple had been destroyed more than a century before the redaction. Tohorot, purities, the largest and most technical order, maps the transmission of ritual impurity and the immersion pools that remove it. The sixty three tractates move by topic rather than by verse, a deliberate departure from scriptural order that let the redactor place related rulings side by side, compare the opinions of named sages, and leave many disputes standing unresolved for later generations to argue.