Talmaiתלמי

Negative results

A plus with no rabbinic witness is a finding. Here are the 34 of 80 units the bench does not carry, and the limits of the bench that bound the claim.

Units with no rabbinic witness

No verbatim or motif parallel outside the medieval retranslations. "Retranslation only" means the unit survives in Hebrew solely through the Additions' medieval return from Latin.

The pattern: the opening images of Mordecai's dream, and the dream's interpretation, survive only in the Yosippon family; the Greek's introduction of Mordecai says nothing the rabbis did not take from Esther 2:5–6; Addition A's version of the eunuchs' plot is a doublet of Esther 2:21–23; the two royal letters' heading, charges and Hellenistic rhetoric left no trace outside medieval translations; and parts of the prayers and the audience have no witness. The second round of verification enlarged this list from fourteen units to 34, because it rejected most of the motif candidates that had kept units off it. 34 units cannot carry a stronger claim than that.

Works that returned nothing, as expected

Some works sat on the bench as controls, to test that the search does not find Esther where Esther is not. After verification none of them carries Esther reception: the Otzar Midrashim "Story of Daniel" (the study's negative benchmark), Genesis Rabbah 68, and b. Sanhedrin. The Targum to Job 42 and b. Bava Batra were never Esther candidates.

What the bench does not contain

Model silence is never evidence. Only a verified search of a named text is.