Rav Pappa's Ten Sons (article summary)
This is a summary of my recent article, Rav Pappa’s Ten Sons. You can read it here: (paid Substack, Jewish Link HTML, and flipdocs)
Briefly, the idea is:
There is a list of Ten Sons of Rav Pappa that we commonly recite during a siyum, for reasons fairly unknown. A common assumption is that these are all sixth-generation sons of fifth-generation Amora Rav Pappa.
However, we don’t say bar Rav Pappa, just bar Pappa. And many of these are even earlier generations than Rav Pappa, namely third-generation.
In our sugya, five of the ten appear. Or they probably don’t really appear. Three appear as Amar X mishum Y mishum Z, but then there are two additional variants included in the gemara itself, in the form of ikka de’amrei, “alternatively”. Thus doesn’t yield nine (3 Amoraim x 3 variants) since there is overlap between variants.
Some manuscripts have fewer variants or fewer Amoraim per variant.
Some of these only appear here, nowhere else, so I would guess they are pure scribal error, not a real Amora. Which is then quite interesting that they are listed among the ten — nice round number — sons of Pappa.
These three bar Pappas are all third-generation. Why are they citing each other?
Also, these three bar Pappas in the chain say a total of three statements. My strong feeling is that really each bar Pappa said one statement, but the corpus was organized as statements by a bar Pappa.
Also, exploration of the five who appear in the sugya, to try to establish their scholastic generation.
Perhaps a later article will explore the remaining five bar Pappas.