Mishnah
The first great collection of rabbinic law, compiled in Galilee about AD 200 from the teaching of earlier generations. It preserves Jewish memory of the temple, of its festivals and of the two wars against Rome.
The Mishnah arranges the oral teaching of the rabbis in six orders and sixty-three tractates. Tradition names Rabbi Judah the Prince as its editor. Much of it concerns the temple and its worship, set down generations after the temple was destroyed.
It is a legal work, not a history, and it mentions events only in passing. Tractate Ta’anit (4:6), explaining the fast of the ninth of Av, lists five disasters that fell on that day, among them that Betar was captured and that the city was ploughed. The notice was written down within about seventy years of the Bar Kokhba revolt and shows how the fall of Betar was remembered among Jews.
Cited in
- AD 132 to AD 135, estimated date