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Concept
Tosefta
Summary
The Tosefta (תוספתא "supplement, addition") is a compilation of Jewish Oral Law from the late second century, the period of the Mishnah and the Jewish sages known as the Tannaim.
In many ways, the Tosefta acts as a supplement (toseftā) to the Mishnah. The Mishnah (משנה) is the basic compilation of the Oral law of Judaism; according to the tradition, it was compiled in 189 CE. The Tosefta closely corresponds to the Mishnah, with the same divisions for sedarim ("orders") and masekhtot ("tractates"). It is mainly written in Mishnaic Hebrew, with some Aramaic.
At times the text of the Tosefta agrees nearly verbatim with the Mishnah. At others there are significant differences. The Tosefta often attributes laws that are anonymous in the Mishnah to named Tannaim. It also augments the Mishnah with additional glosses and discussions. It offers additional aggadic and midrashic material, and it sometimes contradicts the Mishnah in the ruling of Jewish law, or in attributing in whose name a law was stated.
According to the Talmud, the Tosefta was redacted by Ḥiya bar Abba and one of his students, Hoshaiah. Whereas the Mishna was considered authoritative, the Tosefta was supplementary. The Talmud often utilizes the traditions found in the Tosefta to examine the text of the Mishnah.
The traditional view is that the Tosefta should be dated to a period concurrent with or shortly after the redaction of the Mishnah. This view pre-supposes that the Tosefta was produced in order to record variant material not included in the Mishnah.
Modern scholarship can be roughly divided into two camps. Some, such as Jacob N. Epstein, theorize that the Tosefta as we have it developed from a proto-Tosefta recension which formed much of the basis for later Amoraic debate. Others, such as Hanokh Albeck, theorize that the Tosefta is a later compendium of several baraitot collections which were in use during the Amoraic period.
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