The phrase is Isaiah's, seven centuries before Yeshua picked it up and put it on the table in Mark 7. Mitzvat is the construct form of mitzvah, commandment. Anashim is men, human beings. Melumadah is the feminine passive participle of the root למד, lamad, to teach or to learn, in the Pual stem: drilled-in, trained, memorized, taught by repetition. The full phrase is not "tradition" in the soft English sense. It is "a commandment that has been drilled into people by repetition until it feels like revelation."

Rashi on Isaiah 29:13 reads the phrase as teaching-without-heart, the outward motion of observance emptied of the inner direction of the will. Ibn Ezra picks up the mechanical quality: worship performed by reflex, not by decision. The Targum Jonathan paraphrases it as commandments of men taught as if they were Torah. All three readings converge: the problem is not that the commandment is human, it is that human repetition has laundered a human commandment into the weight of a divine one.

Yeshua quotes Isaiah 29:13 against the Pharisees in Mark 7:6-13 and Matthew 15:3-9, and the charge is precise. He does not attack mitzvot as such. He attacks the mechanism by which human instruction gets drilled in until the congregation can no longer tell the difference between what HaShem said and what tradition repeated. The phrase names the move, and names it so exactly that it has carried for twenty-seven centuries.