Literary text: CUL Add.4320a-d + T-S AS 139.1

Description

"A fragment of vellum containing a Latin text of a sermon by Saint Augustine — an unquestionably Christian text — is probably one of the last things you’d expect to find in the Cairo Genizah. Christian texts do find their way into the Collection, however, often as the undertext of palimpsests, as here, where a piece of vellum containing Book 2 Chapter 24 of St. Augustine’s De Sermone Domini in Monte (the Sermon on the Mount) has been reused by a Jewish scribe to write masoretic lists. The manuscript was barely scraped, or perhaps only washed, before being reused, and the Latin text, which is in a hand probably dating from the sixth century CE, is still clearly legible where it is exposed in the clear space between the columns of Hebrew text. The masoretic lists are in an early hand too, probably of the 9–10th century, and preserve notes to 1 Samuel 9, including a list of the occurrences of the plene spelling of ‘Benjamin’. As would be expected, there are a number of differences between the lists and the standard critical edition of the Masoretic Text in use today (which is based on Codex Leningrad B19a)." Information from Outhwaite, B. (2007). St Augustine in the Genizah. [Genizah Research Unit, Fragment of the Month, May 2007]. https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.40134.