Beyond individual fragments, there are a few groups of manuscripts whose fame extends beyond the usual audience of Genizah scholars too. Among these, the ‘Second Temple texts’ are pre-eminent. These manuscripts, whose textual origins lie in the period between the construction of the Second Temple in the 6th c BCE and its destruction in 70 CE, have somehow been preserved in the amber of the Fusṭāṭ Genizah, despite largely dropping out of the historical record elsewhere.The article also discusses the apocryphal psalms manuscript Antonin 798, another Cairo Geniza text. More on it here and here.Foremost among these are the fragments of the six Genizah manuscripts of Ben Sira – with copies a thousand years older subsequently turning up in caves 2 and 11 at Qumran, and at Masada. The first Ben Sira discoveries were followed rapidly, thanks to Solomon Schechter’s remarkable eye for the unusual, by the two manuscripts of the Zadokite Work, T-S 10K6 and T-S 16.311 . Later on, numerous fragments of its forebear, the Damascus Document, were found in Qumran caves 4 and 5. Added to these is the single parchment manuscript of Aramaic Levi in the Cambridge, Oxford and Manchester Genizah collections, which preserves a text probably composed in the 3rd c. BCE. Fragments were identified in Qumran caves 1 and 4.
What is the relationship between the Second Temple texts of the Genizah and the fragment under discussion here, Mosseri I.40? The first publication of the Mosseri fragment suggested a thematic and historical link to this group of Second Temple manuscripts. Since then, except for the occasional appearance in footnotes, the Mosseri manuscript had mostly been forgotten, until this year.
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