text · B0035
Sifrei Zuta ספרי זוטא
The second, smaller halakhic midrash on Bamidbar — lost as a book and recovered from citations and the genizah. Its habit of contradicting the Mishnah's rulings makes it a rare window into a tannaitic school whose tradition did not become the canonical one.
I. Who
- Hebrew
- ספרי זוטא
- Era
- tannaim
II. When
- Traditional
- tannaitic; a halakhic midrash on Bamidbar alongside the Sifrei
- Civil (computed)
- 3990–4110 AM · 230–350 CE
- Academic
- redacted c. 3rd–4th c. CE in Eretz Yisrael from tannaitic material
- Duration
- ≈120 years
- Precision
- disputed
IV. What
- Language
- Mishnaic Hebrew
- Redaction
- Anonymous; broadly of the Akiva school like the Sifrei on Bamidbar (Sifrei), but with enough independent terminology and rulings that Lieberman argued it preserves a distinct tannaitic school's tradition.
- Structure
- A halakhic midrash on Bamidbar ("the small Sifrei"), running as verse-commentary on the book's legal portions, parallel to the Sifrei but frequently ruling and deriving differently.
V. How do we know
| Claim | Evidence | Confidence | Sources |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sifrei Zuta is a tannaitic halakhic midrash on Bamidbar distinct from the Sifrei, known to the rishonim (cited in Yalkut Shimoni and by the author of Midrash HaGadol) and recovered in the modern era from those citations and Cairo Genizah fragments (Horovitz's edition, 1917). | rabbinic reconstruction | ★★★★☆ |
|
| The work's independence is substantive: it transmits halakhic positions that diverge from the Mishnah's, and Saul Lieberman argued it stems from a separate tannaitic academy whose traditions were not absorbed into the canonical corpora.
Lieberman's specific localization (Lydda) is a scholarly proposal; the divergence of its rulings is the checkable fact.
|
reconstruction | ★★★☆☆ |
|