The Fathers According to Rabbi Nathan

304 Pages·1990·8.57 MB·English

by  Judah Goldin

PUBLISHED FOR
JUDAICA RESEARCH AT YALE UNIVERSITY
on the
LOUIS M. RABINOWITZ FOUNDATION
YALE JUDAICA SERIES
EDITOR
JULIAN OBERMANN
Volume X
THE FATHERS
ACCORDING TO RABBI NATHAN
('ABOT Di-RABBl NAT AN)
The Fathers
ACCORDING TO RABBI NATHAN
TRANSLATED FROM THE HEBREW BY
JUDAH GOLDIN
The Jewish Theological Seminary of America
NEW HAVEN
YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS
LONDON . GEOFFREY CUMBERLEGE • OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
1955
Copyrlstt C 1955 by Yale Uru-sty.
Copyr\&Iu C renewed 1983 by Judah GoldIn.
All rJab1I .......-I.
ThIs book may not be reprodua:d, In whole or In put,
Indudini WuauatIona, In any fann (beyood that copylng
pennined by Sectiona 1( f1 and 108 of the
U.s. CopyrigIu law and except by reviewers
for the public press), wiIhout wrinen pamIssIon from the publishers.
Pmed in the UnlIed States 01 America by
Vall-Ballou Preu, Binghamlon. N.Y.
1JInry of Congrea cata10g ani number: 5~1"5
1nIernatIcaal aandard book number:
~697-9 (pbk.)
The paper In this book meeu \be suJdeIInes for
permanence and dwabilky at the CoaunitIee on Produaion
Guldelines for Book J..onaeYkY at \be Council on 1JInry J.esoura:s.
6 8 10 9 7 5
For Grace

EDITOR'S NOTE
I
T is almost exactly ten years since Judaica Research at Yale
University was founded for the purpose of promoting studies
and publications in the various fields of Hebrew lore and lit­
erature. The decennial anniversary is fittingly marked by the ap­
pearance of the present book—Volume Ten of the Yale Judaica
Series. In the Report on the First Year of Wor\, 1944-1945, sub­
mitted to President Charles Seymour and printed for private dis­
tribution, an attempt was made to outline the organization of the
novel project and to define its scope and ramification. It seems ap­
propriate therefore to survey, against that outline, the course of
the project in its first decade of work (1944-54).
Those charged with putting the plan into effect were by no
means unaware of the manifold difficulties and obstacles they were
likely to encounter. They were mindful, in fact, not to permit
their enthusiasm for the project to render them unduly sanguine
about its realization. As the work continued to evolve, their en­
thusiasm did not diminish, but their consciousness of the crucial
responsibility they had taken upon themselves increased with each
book approaching completion, with each manuscript submitted,
with each volume published.
Seen in retrospect, the work so far done is not inconsiderable
and its quality has been found to be not inadequate; but it was
accomplished at a very high cost of human effort and scholarly
labor. Ten years is not too long a period in which to advance the
cause of a greatly specialized and, in many ways, neglected branch
of scholarship. But even half of such a period is a dire price in the
life of the productive scholars who have shared in the work of
the series.
Three of the contributors to the project, each an outstanding
authority in his own field of endeavor, did not live to see their
work published; two of them died even before their labors of
many years had been finished. A moral obligation to publish post-
viii THE FATHERS
humously the three works concerned—and where necessary to
complete them for publication—was felt to be self-evident. It has
afforded us a measure of consolation that the work of Herbert
Danby, the Boo\ of Cleanness, could be brought out within a year
after his demise. At present, plans are under way to publish at
least part of the Boo\ of Seasons, prepared by Solomon Gandz.
And an effort will be made to find a scholar who will undertake
to complete the work that was started and to a considerable extent
advanced by Michael Higger—a translation of three extracanon-
ical but immensely vital and important tractates of the Mishnah.
From the beginning, the principle guiding the editorial policy
of the series has been that of combining accuracy of philological
analysis with complete independence from the style and idiom
of the Semitic texts that were to be made available in translation. It
has often been demonstrated—more often in negative than in posi­
tive terms—that philological accuracy is a sine qua non for safe­
guarding the stylistic independence of a translator of ancient and
medieval works against the hazard of license, misinterpretation, or
unnecessary exegesis.
Even within the relatively limited scope of the two cycles en­
visioned in the report on the first year of work, the series was de­
signed to embrace a rather wide range of subjects, of cultural back­
ground, of literary species, of linguistic variability. The works al­
ready published have been translated, mostly for the first time,
from Ethiopic, Arabic, Aramaic, and several kinds and periods of
Hebrew. In literary subject matter they represent Apocrypha,
Agada, liturgy, philosophy, polemics, and a wide sphere of sacred
and civil law. As it often happened in the preparation of our vol­
umes, a given phrase or vocable, especially when used as a stand­
ing locution or technical term, might be found listed in the
standard dictionaries as bearing a variety of connotations. To
make the proper choice or to provide a connotation that was not
listed but had to be deduced from the context in which it occurred,
the translator often found it necessary to consider the literary, cul­
tural, and historical area out of which the work he translated had
grown.
EDITOR'S NOTE ix
Most of our volumes are bound to assume the nature of text
books or works of reference. Some of them have already found
their way onto the shelves of university libraries and seminar
rooms to stand side by side with the classic originals which they
have made available in translation. Lacking in philological pre­
cision and accuracy, they would be condemned as untrustworthy
witnesses to those classics. But failing to replace the idioms of the
originals by the idiom of modern literary English, they would
have failed to render the classic monuments accessible to non-
Semitist scholars—historians, theologians, philosophers, jurists—
and would be of even less service to the general reader, for both
of whom they have been primarily intended.
In the initial report the belief was expressed that it might be
advantageous to find, for the works selected, translations already
made by scholars on their own initiative. It may now be said that
the advantage has been found to lie in the opposite direction. In
fact, in cases where a manuscript submitted for publication con­
tained work which the translator had done at his own discretion,
such work had virtually to be done over again in order to adjust
it to the essentially popular nature of the series and, in particular,
to the principle of its editorial policy.
As a rule, however, our translations have been prepared by
scholars for the specific purpose of submitting them for publica­
tion in the present series. This has made it possible for translator
and editor to cooperate in the task on hand from beginning to
end: from the time the work got under way until its completion,
and from questions bearing on details of the translation and an­
notations to those concerning the nature of the introduction, the
make-up of the index, and often even the exact wording of the
title. This close progressive cooperation has given the published
volumes inner cohesion, as well as outer uniformity, despite their
great divergence in subject matter and cultural-literary species.
By contrast, another belief expressed in the initial report has
crystallized into firm conviction: that the enormous range of
hitherto untranslated Jewish classics should be made available to
the humanistic sciences and the general public. What has been