[Mesorah] a kleinigkeit

Sun Jan 28 11:10:03 PST 2018

I wish you would go to R. Breuer's book and see if he mentions this case.

Yes, I believe that he put in both a meteg and a hataph vowel was because he felt too many people would be confused about the absence of a hataph. I don't remember any cases at all of a hataph vowel having a meteg.  Plain sh'was do all the time, as do other vowels, but I do not believe there is any other case of a hataph vowel having a meteg.

In two mss. that I have access to, one of which being the Leningrad, there is no hataph, only a meteg.  What mss. do you think R Breuer would be relying on?

I think this is one example where R. Kohen's Bar Ilan reconstruction of the Aleppo Codex has gone astray.  Remember, he is not trying to represent the majority of good mss. like R. Breuer was.  He is trying to reconstruct the Aleppo Codex, and one can always argue about attempted reconstructions, as I am doing in this case.  The same question I have asked before again applies here: what mss. is R. Kohen relying on that contradicts the Leningrad and the "B" ,ms. (British Museum Oriental 4445)?

Rabbi Dr. Seth Mandel

________________________________
From: Jeremy Rosenbaum Simon <jeremy.simon at nyu.edu>
Sent: Sunday, January 28, 2018 1:49 PM
To: Mandel, Seth
Cc: mesorah at aishdas.org
Subject: Re: [Mesorah] a kleinigkeit

With all due respect, I think it is you who are misunderstanding, or at least misapplying, R. Breuer's shittah. It is true that R. Breuer included extra-masoretic metagim so as not to appear "odd" to those who were used to them. But that is the only concession he made to simple expectations, and is not, in any case, relevant here, where the meteg is masoretic (as can be seen from its presence in the list, as well as, in the Keter Yerushalaim, being a long meteg.

As for his approach to chataf vowels, the only ones he modified where chataf vowels under non-guttural letters whose purpose was simply to indicate a shva na. He did this because he felt strongly that such a chataf should be pronounced as a shva, and not a short patach, and felt that continuing to print the chataf was misleading to readers. If anything, this is a case where he deviated from what readers would expect, in contradistinction to his approach with metagim (albeit still with the average reader in mind).

But this practice has no relevance to the case at hand. He did not change a chataf under a non-guttural to a shva. He "changed" one under a guttural to a full vowel. This is entirely different, and, as far as I can tell from what I remember of what R. Breuer wrote (and I have read much of it, including the relevant sections of the book on the Aleppo codex), he would not have deviated from Aleppo in this if he did not have significant textual support from other manuscripts. The fact that Bar Ilan, which does not share R. Breuer's methodology for meteg or for chataf (Prof. Cohen kept all the chatafs R. Breuer changed) arrived at the same conclusion furhter supports that this decision is well supported generally and not a feature of a quirk of R. Breuer's methodology.

Jeremy

On Sun, Jan 28, 2018 at 12:48 PM, Mandel, Seth <mandels at ou.org<mailto:mandels at ou.org>> wrote:

You misunderstand R. Breuer's shitta.  As he explains, he mostly goes according to the majority of the best kisvei yad.  However, he does not want it to appear too strange to regular Jews.  As a consequence, he omits all the many hataph vowels that Ben Asher put into the Codex, and puts in the "metegs" that people are used to, even if they do not exist in any of the best mss.  He tries to distinguish the ge‘ayot that are in the mss. as opposed to the others by having the printer use metegs of different length.  In this case, I am sure he did not want to depart from the hataph-patah because that is what people are used to.

There are no mss. that have both a ge‘aya AND a hataph on this word to the best of my knowledge.

You can go to R. Breuer's long book about how he decided questions without having the Aleppo Codex available: he uses the majority of the good mss., since in almost all cases the majority agrees with the Codex.  I am sure that if he mentions this case there he will say that the mss. all have a full patah.

Rabbi Dr. Seth Mandel

________________________________
From: Jeremy Rosenbaum Simon <jeremy.simon at nyu.edu<mailto:jeremy.simon at nyu.edu>>
Sent: Sunday, January 28, 2018 12:05 PM
To: Mandel, Seth
Subject: Re: [Mesorah] a kleinigkeit

I was only addressing the patach, not the meteg. As for the list at the back, that only represents one manuscript, in this case Leningrad, not "the manuscripts". This list lets you see where his final decision deviated from that of his primary manuscript, which, depending on the edition and the section of Tanach, is either Leningrad or Aleppo. However, he deviated only on the basis of textual evidence, at least in the vast majority of cases. I would be extremely surprised to find that he changed the nikkud here without strong manuscript evidence.

On Jan 28, 2018, at 11:54 AM, Mandel, Seth <mandels at ou.org<mailto:mandels at ou.org>> wrote:

Not true.

Breuer, following his own shitta, has both a hataph-patah AND a ge‘aya.  And in the index in the back of his editions of the T'NaKh, where he lists the forms actually found in the mss, he has a full patah and a ge‘aya.

Rabbi Dr. Seth Mandel
Rabbinic Coordinator
The Orthodox Union

Voice (212) 613-8330<tel:(212)%20613-8330>     Fax (212) 613-0718<tel:(212)%20613-0718>     e-mail mandels at ou.org<mailto:mandels at ou.org>

________________________________
From: Jeremy Rosenbaum Simon <jeremy.simon at nyu.edu<mailto:jeremy.simon at nyu.edu>>
Sent: Sunday, January 28, 2018 11:31 AM
To: Mandel, Seth
Cc: mesorah at aishdas.org<mailto:mesorah at aishdas.org>
Subject: Re: [Mesorah] a kleinigkeit

Given that both R. Breuer and Bar Ilan have a chataf parachute, I find it difficult to credit you claim that _all_ ben Asher manuscripts have a full patach. Neither of them would have deviated from Leningrad, which indeed has a full patach, without good support. And dikduk rules would not factor significantly.

Jeremy

On Jan 28, 2018, at 11:11 AM, Mandel, Seth via Mesorah <mesorah at lists.aishdas.org<mailto:mesorah at lists.aishdas.org>> wrote:

I call it that because most people only care about masorah if it changes the meaning or the pronunciation.

But the non-defenestrated denizens of the Mesorah group understand that the masorah is much deeper than such things, and is important in light of the number of rishonim who spent time on it.

So I am mentioning something that I shamefully admit that I was unaware of all my years:

In the pasuq:

יד:יא וַיֹּאמְרוּ, אֶל-מֹשֶׁה הֲמִבְּלִי אֵיןקְבָרִים בְּמִצְרַיִם לְקַחְתָּנוּ לָמוּת בַּמִּדְבָּר, מַה-זֹּאת עָשִׂיתָ לָּנוּ לְהוֹצִיאָנוּ מִמִּצְרָיִם.

regarding the word "hamibb'li," all printed Chumashim have the punctuation as is above, with a hataph-patah under the he'.

However, that is not the puncuation in the kisvei yad that represent the Ben-Asher masorah.  Rather, all of them, without exception have a full patah — WITH a ge‘aya/AKA meteg.  As the meritorious members of this group are aware, that means that the syllable "ha" is lengthened and has a secondary stress.

The Minchas Shai already noticed this issue.  He notes that R. Yonah had it with a full patah, and it is the R'DaQ who says it should be a hataph-patah based on S'faradi mss.  He even goes on to say that there are some who claim that the ms. on which R.Yonah was basing himself was the Aleppo Codex.  That means to me that the Minchas Shay, without being able to decide the matter, attaches serious weight to the view of R. Yonah.

In any event, now we can be certain based on the better mss. that we have.

Prescriptive grammarians, who hold that the he' hash'elah should always have a hataph-patah, of course will be disturbed.  But as we know, the Masorah did not believe in prescriptive grammar, only in descriptive.

Rabbi Dr. Seth Mandel
Rabbinic Coordinator
The Orthodox Union

Voice (212) 613-8330<tel:(212)%20613-8330>     Fax (212) 613-0718<tel:(212)%20613-0718>     e-mail mandels at ou.org<mailto:mandels at ou.org>
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