To read the summary records which early rabbinic Judaism composed of its own historical antecedents is to gain an impression of strictly sequential transmission. The torah expounded by the sages, they suggest, is not the outgrowth of a momentary cultural oscillation; still less might the rabbinic interpretation of the Bible's teachings be considered the contingent product of recent political revolutions. Notwithstanding the turbulence of Jewry's recent and distant past, the integrity of the original Law had always been preserved, principally because the links of continuity in the chain of its transmission had never been broken.

In its blandest and most condensed form, rabbinic Judaism's own version of its parentage is encapsulated in the very first paragraphs of Mishnah 'Avot:

Having thus reached a point roughly midway into the chronology of the second Commonwealth, the tractate then goes on to record a handful of the traditions transmitted by Simon the Just (‘one of the last survivors of the men of the great assembly’). Others, it relates, were thereafter ‘received’ from him by a string of personalities, beginning with a certain ‘Antigonus of Socho’ and culminating with the twin titans of Pharisaic memory, Hillel and Shamm'ai.