Position Among The "Smaller Treatises"
Ancient authorities mention especially seven such treatises, which are doubtless the earliest ones; and among these the tractate containing the rules on the writing of the "books" occupies a particularly prominent place on account of the importance of its contents. The name as well as the form of the smaller treatises indicates that they originated in the period of oral tradition which was dominated by the Talmud and the Midrash, so that these treatises are doubtless of great antiquity, some of them having been compiled in their main outlines before even the final redaction of the Talmud in the 6th century. This theory holds good with regard to the treatise Sefer Torah also, to which the treatise Soferim bears an especially close relation.
Read more about this topic: Soferim (Talmud)
Famous quotes containing the words position, smaller and/or treatises:
“The essence of spirit, he thought to himself, was to choose the thing which did not better one’s position but made it more perilous. That was why the world he knew was poor, for it insisted morality and caution were identical.”
—Norman Mailer (b. 1923)
“Here is the paradox: What children take from us, they give. When we are not totally “free,” we learn how to cope with a smaller world, less time, less luxury,... We become people who feel more deeply, question more deeply, hurt more deeply and love more deeply.”
—Sonia Taitz (20th century)
“[T]here is a Wit for Discourse, and a Wit for Writing. The Easiness and Familiarity of the first, is not to savour in the least of Study; but the Exactness of the other, is to admit of something like the Freedom of Discourse, especially in Treatises of Humanity, and what regards the Belles Lettres.”
—Richard Steele (1672–1729)