Critical Edition of Tosefta Order Tohorot: A Collection of Early Rabbinic Writings on Laws of Ritual Purity

FAIN: RQ-50469-10

Ofeq Institute, Inc. (Wickliffe, OH 44092-2728)
Abraham Shoshana (Project Director: November 2009 to April 2017)

Preparation of a critical edition of Order Tohorot of the Tosefta, part of the corpus of early rabbinic literature. (12 months)

This project will produce a critical edition of Tosefta Order Tohorot, one of the most difficult and neglected texts of early rabbinic Judaism covering all aspects of the biblical/rabbinic laws of ritual purity. Building on the methods developed by the late Prof. Saul Lieberman, the project will provide the world of scholarship for the first time with an accurate transcription of the sole surviving complete medieval manuscript of this text, together with a variants apparatus, extensive references to all relevant passages in the Talmudic and rabbinic literature, notes and comments, and a realia dictionary. In its final form, the critical edition will be approximately 1200 printed pages in length, and will also be made available online. It will provide an invaluable tool for a number of key fields of contemporary academic scholarship including the interpretation of the Dead Sea Scrolls and the study of the ancient material culture of the Eastern Roman Empire.