Introduction to the Translation

Before proceeding, let us turn to the other mode of uniting the dual Torah. We consider a translation of a sample of Sifra, 6 chapters of the 277 into which both available printed versions (identified presently) divide the document. In this way the reader will have a clear picture of the working of the document as a whole. Sifra, like all other writings of the dual Torah produced in late antiquity, is rhetorically, logically, and topically a uniform statement, repetitious in its basic structure, a fixed form in rhetoric and pattern of modes of thought. Together with the translation, I remark on matters pertinent to the description of the document as a whole.

In my translation I mark each of the smallest whole units of thought with a letter, each of the completed propositions of thought (that we might call “paragraphs”) with an Arabic numeral, and entire cogent statements or arguments with a Roman numeral. I anticipate that, however the exegesis of the text may improve upon my basic translation and revise and correct details of sense imputed to words and phrases, the fundamental analytical structure I have identified and presented will endure, as it has for every other document in the rabbinic canon I have translated. In the present case I have ignored the paragraphing of the printed document and made up my own. The reason is that the printed versions in the Hebrew break up sustained and protracted discussions, on the one side, or present as a single discourse two or more whole and completed units of thought, on the other.