I heard a lecture by rabbi Wieder entitled “halakhic responses to textual variants”.(It was a very good lecture – here’s his source sheet if you’re curious). At the end he touched upon the origins of the baraita of the four sons found in the haggadah which is something I talked about in my pesach talk last year.

First some quick background for those of you who don’t want to bother reading through the links above. The baraita of the four sons has two origins – the talmud yerushalmi, or the mekhilta. You can see them in their entirety in the source sheet, but for now I just want to focus on the wise son’s question.

Both the yerushalmi and the mekhilta have the same question for the wise son:

בן חכם מהו אומר (דברים ו) מה העדות והחקים והמשפטים אשר צוה ה’ אלהינו אותנו

The wise son – what does he say? “What is this work, the laws, and customs that our god has commanded us“.

The problem of course is that the son’s questions all come from the torah, and our text is a little different:

מָה הָעֵדֹת, וְהַחֻקִּים וְהַמִּשְׁפָּטִים, אֲשֶׁר צִוָּה יְהוָה אֱלֹהֵינוּ, אֶתְכֶם.

What mean the testimonies, and the statutes, and the ordinances, which the lord our God hath commanded you?

Our haggadahs all modify the original baraita to use the word “you” for the wise son. This of course erases the key distinction between the wise son and the wicked son who is heavily chastised for using the word “you” and excluding himself from the community. Rb. Wieder thought that this showed that the rabbis of the talmud and midrash were using a textual variant. (Which, if you look at his notes, is one of many such examples).

The only explanation I’d heard for the discrepancy before was the explanation advanced by David Tzvi Hoffman and quoted by Menachem Mendel Kasher in haggadah sheleimah (the greatest compendium of haggadah commentary ever). Hoffman points out that in devarim Moshe is speaking to the people, so it makes complete sense for Moshe to say “you”, and he is not excluding himself from the community, it’s just that Moshe is speaking to the people and his whole speech is in the second person.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 23rd, 2010 at 4:15 pm by Ari and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.