The Mishnah (Eduyot 1:4–6) states three explicit reasons for recording rejected and minority legal opinions beside the accepted ruling, rather than deleting them

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Mishnah Eduyot, chapter 1 (redacted tradition, ~200 CE), interrupts its own record of Hillel–Shammai legal disputes to ask directly why the rejected and superseded opinions are preserved in the text at all, given that practice follows only the majority ruling. The text gives three distinct, stacked reasons:

1. Pedagogical (Eduyot 1:4) — "to teach the following generations that a man should not [always] persist in his opinion, for behold, the fathers of the world did not persist in their opinion." Even the tradition's founding authorities abandoned positions; persistence-in-error is not modeled as a virtue.
2. Forward-looking procedural (Eduyot 1:5) — a later court "may depend on" a recorded minority opinion it prefers, because "no court may set aside the decision of another court unless it is greater than it in wisdom and in number." A court lacking standing to overturn a ruling outright can still revive a minority view that was never erased from the record.
3. Defensive/evidentiary (Eduyot 1:6, attributed to Rabbi Judah) — a recorded-and-rejected opinion lets the tradition correct a false claim of authority: if someone says "thus have I received the tradition," the record can answer "according to the [refuted] opinion of that individual did you hear it."

None of the three reasons given is procedural convenience ("because deleting text is hard"). Reasons 2 and 3 are about preserving future optionality and future falsifiability — the same shape as the vault's own myth-ledger practice of appending a dated status entry beside a claim rather than editing over it (myth-linnainmaa-uncited-before-2010s), where a walked-back entry stays legible so a later pass can recover what was claimed, when, and by what reasoning. It is a distinct textual-tradition instance from the modern software lineage claim-canonic-situates-its-ledger-in-a-named-immutability-lineage names for itself (Unix, POSIX, Bitcoin) — a premodern precedent for the same non-destructive-correction shape, rather than a restatement of it — and sits beside the vault's existing Talmud print-history cluster (claim-bomberg-1520s-venice-talmud-set-standard-page-layout, claim-soncino-1483-originated-talmud-gemara-rashi-tosafot-layout) as the textual tradition's own stated rationale, where that cluster documents only the printers' mechanics.