text · B0034
Mekhilta DeRabbi Shimon bar Yochai מכילתא דרבי שמעון בר יוחאי
The "other" Mekhilta — the Akiva school's halakhic midrash on Shemot. Lost as a book after the Middle Ages and recovered in modern times from citations and genizah fragments, it completes the pairing that runs through the halakhic midrashim: for most of the Torah's legal books, both great tannaitic schools left a commentary.
I. Who
- Hebrew
- מכילתא דרבי שמעון בר יוחאי
- Also known as
- Mekhilta DeRashbi
- Era
- tannaim
II. When
- Traditional
- tannaitic; from the school of R' Akiva, redacted after the Mishnah
- Civil (computed)
- 3990–4110 AM · 230–350 CE
- Academic
- redacted c. 3rd–4th c. CE in Eretz Yisrael from tannaitic material
- Duration
- ≈120 years
- Precision
- disputed
IV. What
- Language
- Mishnaic Hebrew
- Redaction
- Anonymous; assigned by its hermeneutical fingerprint to the school of R' Akiva (Rabbi Akiva), the counterpart of the Yishmael-school Mekhilta (Mekhilta DeRabbi Yishmael). The association with R' Shimon bar Yochai rests on medieval citation habits and the prominence of his teachings in it, not on a Talmudic statement.
- Structure
- A halakhic midrash on Shemot, running as verse-commentary across the legal portions of the book — the Akiva-school parallel to the Yishmael-school Mekhilta, frequently deriving the same laws by different hermeneutical routes.
V. How do we know
| Claim | Evidence | Confidence | Sources |
|---|---|---|---|
| The work is a tannaitic halakhic midrash on Shemot whose terminology and hermeneutics mark it as a product of R' Akiva's school, standing opposite the Mekhilta of R' Yishmael's school on the same book. | rabbinic reconstruction | ★★★☆☆ |
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| The book ceased to be copied and was lost after the Middle Ages; it was recovered in the modern era from its quotations in Midrash HaGadol and from Cairo Genizah fragments — first reconstructed by D.Z. Hoffmann (1905), then critically by Epstein and Melamed (1955). | reconstruction | ★★★★☆ |
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| The title's attribution to R' Shimon bar Yochai reflects rishonim's citation practice and the work's opening material rather than an ancient authorship statement; like the other halakhic midrashim it is a school-corpus, so the atlas records no author edge. | tradition reconstruction | ★★★☆☆ |
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