The book named by a formula

Claim (verbatim)

Scattered through the medieval sources are quotations opened by "Yelammedenu Rabbenu" ("let our master teach us") - the signature incipit of a homiletic midrash, the Tanhuma-Yelammedenu, that poses a halakhic question and unfolds an aggadic sermon from it. The problem is that no single book called Yelammedenu survives cleanly: the tradition comes down in overlapping, divergent recensions - the printed (standard) Midrash Tanhuma and the Buber recension edited from manuscripts differ substantially in which homilies they carry and in what order - and medieval citations of a "Yelammedenu" sometimes match neither. The formula itself is the tracer. Mechanism: a homiletic genre organized around a recurring rhetorical opening leaves that opening as a countable fossil, so the density and distribution of the yelammedenu-formula across the surviving recensions measures how much of a once-larger Yelammedenu each recension actually preserves. If the recensions are independent siftings of a lost fuller corpus, their formula-bearing homilies should overlap only partially, and the formula-rate should differ recension to recension. Prediction restated: the "yelammedenu rabbenu" opening appears in a large but recension-dependent share of Tanhuma sections, and the two recensions' sets of formula-bearing homilies overlap well below unity - two partial nets thrown over a vanished book.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Prediction: string-counting the "ילמדנו רבנו" (yelammedenu rabbenu) opening formula across Sefaria's Midrash Tanchuma (standard) and Midrash Tanchuma Buber recensions, the per-section occurrence rate will differ between the two recensions by at least 50% (a rate ratio outside the band 0.67-1.5), and the Jaccard overlap of the two recensions' sets of formula-bearing homilies (matched by parasha and pericope) will fall below 0.6 - primary clause: the sub-0.6 cross-recension overlap of yelammedenu homilies; the verdict follows it. The test voids for coverage if fewer than 50 formula instances are found across both recensions combined.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: Sefaria's Midrash Tanchuma and Midrash Tanchuma Buber - string-match the "ילמדנו רבנו" opening, tabulate per-section rates and the parasha-aligned overlap of formula-bearing homilies between the recensions, with Buber's printed edition and the Mann-Sonne studies of the synagogue homily as the philological controls.

Novelty / leakage triage

anticipated in the literature — this exact test has never been run

The Tanhuma-Yelammedenu problem is thoroughly published: Buber's introduction set out the two recensions' divergence, Strack-Stemberger states the standard datum that the Buber recension differs substantially in Genesis and Exodus while running close to the printed Tanhuma for the other books, and Bregman's monograph is a full stratigraphy of the versions, with the Nikolsky-Atzmon volume carrying the field forward. But the specific instrument - string-counting the yelammedenu incipit across both Sefaria recensions, per-section rates, and a parasha-matched Jaccard overlap with its 0.6 threshold - has never been run; Bregman's analysis is philological, not tabulated at formula level.

• S. Buber (ed.), Midrasch Tanchuma (Vilna, 1885), introduction
• M. Bregman, The Tanhuma-Yelammedenu Literature: Studies in the Evolution of the Versions (Hebrew; Piscataway: Gorgias Press, 2003)
• R. Nikolsky & A. Atzmon (eds.), Studies in the Tanhuma-Yelammedenu Literature (Leiden: Brill, 2021)
• H. L. Strack & G. Stemberger, Introduction to the Talmud and Midrash (2nd ed., 1996), Tanhuma-Yelammedenu section

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.