An important early work of biblical commentary, the Pesikta de Rav Kahana, will be published by the Jewish Theological Seminary, thus making it available to Bible scholars in its original form after it was lost for centuries.
The Seminary said that Prof. Bernard Mandelbaum, its Provost, prepared the definitive edition of the fifth century work. The Pesikta is part of the Midrash, the non-legal commentary on Jewish religious lore.
The publication was made possible in part by the discovery of a version of the work, previously unidentified, in a collection of photostats ordered from the manuscript catalogue of the Oxford University Library. Prof. Mandelbaum also had available part of a collection of fragments in the Leningrad Library which had been microfilmed by Russian scholars with copies made available in the United States.
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