Page 254 - גנזי קדם יא

SUMMARIES 53*

‘Four Cries Issued the Temple
Courtyard’: The Nature of a Genizah
Tradition

Binyamin Katzoff

Department of Talmud, Bar-Ilan University

A beraita found in several variations in the Bavli (Pesahim and Keritot)
relates that the Courtyard of the Israelites of the Temple in Jerusalem
cried out four times because of actions of several priests. A different
variant is found in a Geniza fragment now in the library of the University
of Cambridge, T-S F2(2).76 (henceforth Gt). This fragment, containing
the text of Tosefta Menahot 13.18-22, is written in an oriental pre-square
hand, and dates to the beginning of the tenth century. The textual variant it
presents is of particular importance because of its complex relation to the
various text traditions of the Bavli, especially given the small number of
textual witness we have for this chapter of the Tosefta. In the present study
two questions are addressed: 1) Was the beraita originally in the Tosefta
and dropped from the other textual witnesses, or is it a later addition to
the Tosefta that somehow entered the Geniza text? 2) What is the relation
between the text of the beraita in Gt and that in the various Bavli traditions
of the text, and what can be inferred from that with respect to the presence
of textual traditions in the environment in which Gt was written.

On the first question, considerations of the literary context in the
Tosefta, the quality of the copying of the beraita compared to that of the
other halakhot there, and the influence of the Bavli on the text of Gt other
than the beraita, lead to the conclusion that the beraita is not original in the
Tosefta. Rather it was added to the Tosefta at a late stage under the influence
of the Bavli.

On the second question, Gt contains quite a few independent variants