Tosefta Bava Kamma: A Structural and Analytic Commentary with a Mishna-Tosefta Synopsis.

• Author: Segal, Eliezer
• Position: Book Review

Tosefta Bava Kamma: A Structural and Analytic Commentary with a Mishna-Tosefta Synopsis. By ABRAHAM GOLDBERG, Jerusalem: THE HEBREW UNIVERSITY MAGNES PRESS, 2001. Pp. ix + 297. [Hebrew]. $17.

Professor Abraham Goldberg has had a distinguished career of more than half a century devoted to teaching and researching the literature of the Mishnah, Tosefta, and other branches of tannaitic literature. An ongoing focus of his research has been the attempt to describe the approaches of later rabbis to the received traditions of earlier generations. As applied to individual teachers, he has argued that consistent hermeneutical techniques can be discerned in the rulings of the Ushan generation of sages, in the diverse ways that they interpreted the stratum of oral law that had been formulated by their master Rabbi Akiva. Some of these sages tended to expand the scope of the earlier texts, others to limit them, while still others tried to harmonize them with non-Akivan traditions. (Instances of this theory may be found in the current work in several passages listed in the index entries on p. 233.)

Furthermore, Goldberg proposed a dynamic and functional conception of the relationship between the genres of Mishnah and Tosefta, according to which each generation produced its own stratum of commentary and ancillary material as a supplement to the official version of the Mishnah that had been transmitted from the previous generation. Because the subsequent generation would incorporate this material into its own Mishnah, the Mishnah and Tosefta collections that have come down to us capture the state of the traditions as they existed at the time of the Mishnah's final redaction in the early third century. Goldberg tried to argue his theories in his extensive critical commentaries to the Mishnah tractates Shabbat and 'Eruvin (see his restatement of the theory on pp. 21-22).

The present volume is his first to focus principally on the Tosefta. The scope of its investigation is in fact much more limited than that of its predecessors. Because the tractate Bava Qamma has already been edited (posthumously) in a text-critical edition with an extensive commentary by S. Lieberman, Goldberg has chosen not to deal with either text-critical questions or with the full explanation of the contents. He has confined himself to structural and literary comparisons between the Mishnah and the Tosefta, and to providing a systematic typology of the diverse relationships between the...