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Genizah encore
Eric wrote:
>Selectivity comes to mind. When the genizah is your attic, anything
>goes. When it's a remote cave, you become very selective as to what goes
>into the jars.
which seems logical.
Yet, we have to keep in mind that the caves that had the jars could not have
been genizah. They were not for the storage of old "worn out" documents but
in some way for the preservation of good copies of important documents --
very ungenizah, very unlibrary.
Another thing that disturbs me is the bulk of the documents. There are so
many documents and so many hands involved in their writing. Is there any way
to guesstimate how many religious documents there were flying around Judaea
at the time? As a wild guess these documents could actually have represented
a noticeable percentage of that total. If this were so, how is such a bulk
explained by some isolated offshoot of one of the minor sects?
Cheers, all,
Ian Hutchesson