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A Father's Three Words and a Son's Redaction of the Mishnah

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A Father's Three Words and a Son's Redaction of the Mishnah

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Rabban Shimon ben Gamliel II is remembered chiefly today for a single teaching preserved at Pirkei Avot 1:18, that the world stands on three things, justice, truth and peace, one of the best known sayings in the whole tractate. The saying is documented as his own attributed formulation rather than a proverb later tradition simply assigned to him after the fact, and it is transmitted within the same Mishnaic corpus his own son would go on to redact.

He was also the father of Judah HaNasi, the sage who redacted the Mishnah into the form still studied today, a documented genealogical link between a teacher remembered for one widely quoted maxim and a son whose own editorial work shaped how the entire rabbinic legal tradition would be transmitted afterward. The father's saying and the son's redaction are preserved within the same corpus without either eclipsing the other, a documented pairing rather than two unrelated achievements that happen to share a family name.

That a teacher chiefly remembered for three carefully weighed words fathered the redactor of the Mishnah itself marks Rabban Shimon ben Gamliel II's combined legacy as a documented case where a single maxim and a monumental editorial achievement, one generation apart, were both instances of the same instinct to weigh transmitted teaching down to its essential and lasting form.

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Sources
The Mishnah: A New Translation
Jacob Neusner, trans., Yale University Press, 1988
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