text · B0040
Pesikta DeRav Kahana פסיקתא דרב כהנא
The oldest homiletic midrash — sermons of the amoraim of Eretz Yisrael arranged on the calendar rather than on a book. The synagogue's cycle of rebuke and consolation around Tishah B'Av is preserved here as a literary architecture; the work itself vanished and was rebuilt by scholarship before the manuscripts surfaced.
I. Who
- Hebrew
- פסיקתא דרב כהנא
- Era
- amoraim
II. When
- Traditional
- aggadah of the amoraim of Eretz Yisrael, arranged on the cycle of the year
- Civil (computed)
- 4160–4260 AM · 400–500 CE
- Academic
- c. 5th c. CE, Eretz Yisrael — of the generation of Vayikra Rabbah
- Duration
- ≈100 years
- Precision
- approximate
IV. What
- Language
- Galilean Aramaic and Hebrew
- Redaction
- Anonymous, in Eretz Yisrael. The title's "Rav Kahana" comes from the piska that opened the collection in the manuscripts known to the medievals ("R' Abba bar Kahana opened") — a labeling habit, not an authorship tradition.
- Structure
- Roughly twenty-eight piskot (discourses) keyed not to a book but to the year: the festival readings and the special Shabbatot, including the three haftarot of rebuke before Tishah B'Av and the seven of consolation from Yeshayahu (B0023) after it.
V. How do we know
| Claim | Evidence | Confidence | Sources |
|---|---|---|---|
| The work is a cycle of piskot for festivals and special Shabbatot — including the sequence of three haftarot of rebuke and seven of consolation — composed of classical Eretz Yisrael aggadah closely akin to Vayikra Rabbah, with which it shares whole piskot. | rabbinic reconstruction | ★★★★☆ |
|
| The book was lost and reconstructed before it was found: Zunz in 1832 inferred its existence, contents, and order from citations in the rishonim and the Yalkut, and manuscripts discovered later confirmed the reconstruction — Buber printed it in 1868, and Mandelbaum's critical edition (1962) fixed the piska order. | reconstruction | ★★★★☆ | |
| Academic dating places the redaction in 5th-century Eretz Yisrael, contemporary with Vayikra Rabbah and the Yerushalmi's circle; the "Rav Kahana" of the title is drawn from an opening attribution in the medieval copies and marks no authorship claim about any of the amoraim of that name. | reconstruction | ★★★☆☆ |
|