Sotah Ends; Swallowed Up Speech
We’ve arrived at the end of Sotah. Here is how our main manuscripts choose to end it.
Munich 95, in addition to the Hadran, had תהלה למחזיק יד הרפה, “praise to He Who Strengthens the hand of the weak”:
Vatican 110 has a masorah, namely the list of perakim: ודין מסורותהון המקנא המביא ונטל ארוסה כשם שקינא למשוח ולעגלה. “One who warns, who brings and takes a betrothed woman, just as he warns the anointed and the calf.”
That is:
המקנא
המביא == Haya meivi
ונטל = haya notel
ארוסה = arusa veshomeret yavam
כשם = keshem shehamayim bodekin
שקינא = mi shekinei le’ishto
A masoretic mnemonic is **missing here** אֵלּוּ נֶאֱמָרִין בְּכׇל לָשׁוֹן
למשוח = meshuach milchama
ולעגלה = eglah arufa
I cannot really make out the smaller text, which I’ve underlined in red, and Hachi Garsinan did not encode it.
Is the first underline a date on Marcheshvan? Could the second underline be the words “perek ve`eileh”, which the same or different scribal hand is trying to add to the masoretic note?
I would guess that this omission may be sparked by some tradition in which that perek has been swallowed up. Consider these perakim and their relative sizes, though this is pages of gemara, rather then Mishnah length.
Could chapter six have simply continued into seven? I wrote a whole article about that perek ve’eileh, vs. beginning with the word eileh. See here for summary and article image:
A lightbulb just went off. Perhaps the reason for an initial vav is to help indicate that the Mishnah was NOT the beginning of a new perek.
On the other hand, the very same Vatican 110 manuscript explicitly ends the previous perek:
This need not be a problem. We can point out a similar situation on the masoretic notes of many Biblical manuscripts. Namely, the masoretic note doesn’t match what is actually in the text. The masoretic note will say that this word is spelled three times in Torah deficiently, and list them. But in the text itself, one of those three will be spelled plene. This because a scribe copied the masoretic note from another text. Perhaps the same occurred here.