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The Tosefta - Companion to the Mishna Abraham Goldberg

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The Tosefta - Companion to the Mishna Abraham Goldberg Chapter Six The Tosefta - Companion to the Mishna Abraham Goldberg Character and Date The name Tosefta means 'addition', and this is what it is: an addition, a complement to the Mishna. 1 It serves this function in more than one way. First of all, as we shall show below, it is the prime commentary or 'talmud' to the Mishna for the first generations o( Amoraim. In this sense it is an 'addition' which gives explanation and illustration to the Mishna. However, it is definitely more, serving as well as a supplementary and companion volume to the Mishna. It will often give a fuller elaboration of mishnaic halakha. Where the Mishna may give only one or two opinions on a particular topic, and often anony­ mously, the Tosefta is apt to provide us with a greater gamut of opinion in addition to an identification of the Tanna of the anonymous opinion. In yet another sense, the Tosefta continues the Mishna. It records the teachings of the last Tannaic generations which, in the main, were not included in the Mishna, i.e. the generation of the compiler of the Mishna itself, Rabbi Yehuda the Patriarch, and the one following. Thus while the Tosefta has the same layer structure as the Mishna-each layer corresponding to a generation of Tannaic teachers- it has two more layers. The two layers, however, which make up the greater part of the Tosefta, are the one that parallels the main layer of the Mishna, i.e. the teachings of the pupils of R. Akiva, and the following one which supplies the teachings of the generation of Rabbi. 2 The Tosefta is also at least three times as large as the Mishna. This is to be expected in a work which combines commentary, supplement and continua­ tion. As such, the Tosefta not only can be seen as the first 'talmud' to the Mishna, but together with the Mishna came to be the very foundation for the teaching of the generations following, which resulted in the Palestinian and Babylonian Talmudim. 3 I XI15l01n tosefta is the Aramaic form of the Hebrew n5l01n tosefet. The plura!forms are xn5l01n tosefata and n15l01n tosefot. 2 See Introduction to Goldberg, Eruvin. 3 The Tosefta is introduced in the Babylonian Talmud, as are baraitot not found in the extant Tosefta, with the redactional terms: p:r1 'Un tannu Rabbanan (our Masters taught), X'Jn tanya (it was taught) and XJn tena (he taught). In the Palestinian Talmud the introductory term is •Jn tenei (which eqals tena) but very frequently there is no introductory term at all. 283 THE TOSEFTA- COMPANION TO THE MISHNA In the following, it will be shown that the text of the Tosefta is very closely interwoven with that of the Mishna, to such an extent that they may almost be considered one literary work. In addition, their language and style are so similar that only one well-trained in the perception of the most delicate literary nuances would be able to tell one from the other when taken out of context. For this reason it seems most irrational to try to search out differences between the two. Nor can any hypothesis which posits artificial distinctions between them, such as the Mishna being oral and the Tosefta written, really hold. Moreover, there is nothing substantial in a theory- and hardly worthwhile the effort- which posits different sources for different tractates of the Tosefta. 4 If there are seeming differences, this is because every individual tractate of the Tosefta relates to its parallel in the Mishna in a particular way. 5 Likewise, differences in order and arrangement have their proper explanations, as will be set forth below. Nor in any way may it be said that the Mishna is Tannaic and the Tosefta Amoraic. 6 The character of the Tosefta gives away its dating. It is so close to the Mishna and so natural a continuation of it that its editing cannot have been much later. All signs point to a difference of, largely, one generation, i.e. to a date around 220-30 c.E. It is certain that the compilation of the Tosefta preceded that of the Tannaic midrash collections, since the latter often quote it verbatim. This is the generally accepted view today; in the past, however, various scholars regarded the Tosefta as a post-Talmudic compilation which drew upon the baraita mate­ rial already found in the Talmud. 7 Arrangement and Contents Like the Mishna, the Tosefta is divided into tractates, tractates into chapters and chapters into halakhot. Clearly, the arrangement of the Tosefta material parallels that of the Mishna. There are three tractates, however, which have no corresponding Tosefta tractate: Tamid, Middot and Kinnim. A vat has no To­ sefta either, but we can consider Avot de-Rabbi Natan as such. Again, as stated before, the number of chapters in each tractate does not always correspond; and the number of halakhot in each chapter of the Tosefta is usually more than double the number of mishnayot in the corresponding Mishna chapter. Yet the most marked difference between these parallel compilations of Tannaic litera­ ture is in the ordering of the halakhot. While the order of the halakhot in the Tosefta largely parallels that of the mishnayot, the exceptions are so numerous that they call for an explanation. 4 Thus, apparently, Strack-Sternberger, Einleitung, 155. 5 Thus the Tosefta mostly gives only the supplementary layer to a full three-layer discussion in the Mishna; and where the Mishna limits itself to the teaching of R. Akiva, the Tosefta will supplement those of his pupils. See below. 6 Strack-Sternberger, Einleitung, 157. 7 Especially, Diinner, Tosephta; and, remarkably, even the noted contemporary scholar, Albeck, Babli and Yerushalmi, 51-8. Albeck's position will be dealt with in detail below. 284 .
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