"דפים נוספים מתוך ספר בן-סירא" (ח. שירמן, תרביץ, כט, עמ' 125—134)

The writer recalls the sensation produced some sixty years ago in learned circles by Schechter's discovery of a fragment of the original Hebrew text of Ecclesiasticus in a tattered leaf from the Cairo Genizah. This led to the subsequent transference to Cambridge of the bulk of that Genizah, and to the recovery by Schechter and other scholars, within the last four years of the nineteenth century, of some two thirds of the ancient Hebrew text. A new chapter in the history of Jewish Studies was then opened when the treasures of the Cairo Genizah were made accessible to scholars. Of the numerous important documents already published from that Genizah, may be singled out for special mention "The Fragments of a Zadokite Work" issued by Schechter in 1910. This enigmatic text aroused a keen though futile controversy among scholars for nearly half a century. But already in 1912 the present writer published in JQR and in the Hebrew Hashshiloaḥ of that year a hypothesis that that document emanated from a dissident Jewish sect in the age of the Hasmoneans. It was at the suggestion of the writer made to the late Prof. Sukenik in December 1947 that the discoverer of the Dead Sea Scrolls began to study the language of the Scrolls in the light of the "Zadokite Fragments", and he soon discovered a relationship between them which contributed to the understanding of the Scrolls as well as the "Zadokite Fragments". The search in the Genizah for further material of the Hebrew Ecclesiasticus stopped with the turn of the century, but about thirty years later Joseph Marcus discovered a leaf of a fifth MS (JQR xxi, 1929). After a lapse of about another thirty years J. Schirmann discovered a new leaf of MS B which he published with facsimiles and notes in Tarbiẕ xvii (1959). This new leaf the present writer incorporated with a fresh critical and textual evaluation in a supplement to the second edition of his "The Complete Ben Sira" (1959). Schirmann has now unearthed three more new leaves which he published with facsimiles, introduction and notes in Tarbiẕ xxix (1960). Of the three new leaves one belongs to MS B and two to MS C. Their contents are on the whole parallel to the material we have in the earlier discoveries. Their chief value, therefore, is in the light they throw upon the development of the Hebrew text of the book. They afford us an insight into the process of deterioration which proceeded from MS to MS. The caligraphically fine MS B which copied its marginal variants from the other MSS, and is therefore younger than they, is often marred by numerous doublets and by textual errors. (The latter defect is of course common to all our MSS). MS C which often agrees with the Greek version must be older than MS A which usually corresponds to the reading of the Syriac version, and which also has a number of doublets. The doublets themselves form an interesting feature in the history of the Hebrew text. As a rule, one verse of the doublet is couched in Biblical Hebrew and agrees with the Greek, while its duplicate is couched in Mishnaic Hebrew and agrees with the Syriac. Quotations in early Rabbinical literature show that, from an early age in the Rabbinical period, proverbs of Ben Sira were current orally and were memorised and also used for homiletical purposes. In this process they gradually lost their original Biblical form and assumed a Mishnaic diction which was simpler and more familiar. The proverbs in their new Mishnaic form found their way into copies of the book, such as the original Hebrew underlying the Syriac version and MS A, and then copyists began to give the two forms of the proverb side by side, the more original Biblical form and the later Mishnaic form. Copyists also allowed themselves to introduce neologisms current in their day, such as תמור in MS A for תחת in MS C and in Greek and Syriac (iii, 14; also iv, 10); אליל (in its Syriac sense) MS A for קטנה in MS B and in Greek (xi, 3) and many others. The article concludes with a series of critical comments on most of the verses of the new leaves.