This article presents for the first time fragments of original text of Rabbi
Isaac Ibn Ghiyyatʼs commentary on the Babylonian Talmud, known until
now from other Rabbisʼ quotations. The fragments are from the Pesachim
.and Bava Metzia Tractates
This original text is important for a number of reasons: first, it quotes
many of Ibn Ghiyyatʼs antecedents and is, at times, their sole source; second,
Ibn Ghiyyat quotes segments of the Talmud and addresses the question of
multiple versions, and finally, this is the first time the original text of the
.commentary is being published

The “Hashem Qanai” (Prov. 8:22) sequences are among the most
conspicuous poems for Pentecost. They are usually comprised of 22
alphabetical long sections where God, as the father, and the Torah, as his
daughter, are arguing about a suitable bridegroom for her. She objects even
to the great forefathers proposed to her by God before finally agreeing to the
.proposition to be given to Moses
We have in our possession about ten such parallel compositions by
Palestinian, Ashkenazi and French poets. In the following article a critical
edition of an unknown Palestinian composition from this genre is published
for the first time. The text is based on an old MS dispersed in three distant
Genizah fragments. Questions of context and contexture are dealt with,
and a comparable connection with the mystical Shiʼur Qomah treatise is
.proposed

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
which indicate that the beraita in Gt does not derive from an exact copy of
any of the Bavli traditions we have. On the other hand, a comparison of the
texts shows an affinity between Gt, and the common tradition in Pesahim
and the text tradition of the Oxford Bodleian manuscript Heb. B. 1/10-20
(2673.8) of Keritot (henceforth S), both in the text of the beraita (where it
does not differ from the Bavli tradition) and in its structure.
Of particular interest is the light Gt sheds on the text of S. The latter
was written in 1123 by a scribe from North Africa, and is considered the
manuscript that best preserves the linguistic peculiarities of tractate Keritot.
Y. Rosenthal showed that its text belongs to the common textual tradition
of Keritot, though it contains some variants which entered from a tradition
.for which we have no direct evidence and of which the origin is unknown
Gt contributes valuable data in that it documents several of the variants in
S. These variants, then, were already available to copyists of the tradition of
.Gt, in the Orient, no later than the beginning of the tenth century

This article contains a new edition of the qedushta Agudei li-shmakh
be-masot for Semini Atzeret by Yannai. As well as integrating all of the
manuscript data that have been published piecemeal over the decades, the
present edition makes use of Genizah fragments that were not available to
previous editors. Its major contribution to the study of the composition is
the reconstruction of the original silluq, which is given here for the first
time in its pristine form. The silluq employs a “double” structure, attested
elsewhere in the Yannai corpus: the first part consists of a patter poem
(rahit), while the second is composed in a freer form which employs mostly
.parallelism and rhyme as devices for structuring the strophes

Published in this paper for the first time are passages taken from the
commentaries of two of the most important Karaite biblical interpreters of
the 10th and 11th centuries, Yafeth ben Eli and Yeshua ben Yehuda, on the
issue of “the slandered bride” (Deut. 22:13-21).The study quotes the Judeo
Arabic sources, and adds an annotated translation. It includes a detailed
,discussion of the commentaries of the Sages and Gaonim on this issue
allowing for a comparative analysis with the early Karaite interpreters. The
discussion can help uncover the origins of early Karaite law, and how it
.crystallized during its early development