98 CHAPTER FOUR
Nabateans with the Egyptians,^64 an identifi cation recorded also by Shah-
rastani.^65 The Sabians are also mentioned, already before Maimonides,
in the context of explaining the commandments of the Torah. As Pines
has shown, this explanation, which appears in the writings of the tenth-
century Qaraite Qirqisani, is a development of the Church Fathers’ con-
cept of “divine accommodation,” and it may have reached Qirqisani and
Maimonides—directly or indirectly— from Christian sources. It is per-
haps not superfl uous to recall that Qirqisani relies heavily on Muqam-
mas, in both his polemics and exegesis. Muqammas may thus have been
a transmission link of this par ticular idea to Jewish thought.^66 The notion
that the behavior of the Israelites must be explained in the context of
their times is also propounded by Judah Halevi.^67 Judah Halevi mentions
al-Filaha al- nabatiyya but he does not associate it with the Sabians, and,
although he presents the contemporaneous, idolatrous culture as attenu-
ating circumstances for the sins of the Israelites, he makes no attempt to
explain the historical context for the commandments.^68 By contrast,
Abraham Ibn Ezra, in his commentary on Ex. 2:10, mentions an agricul-
tural book translated from the Egyptian (!) into Arabic.^69 Maimonides
was infl uenced by Ibn Ezra in general, and in par ticular by his views re-
garding the historical context of the Exodus,^70 and it is possible that this
Übersetzung,” Mémoires des savants étrangers, [St. Petersburg, 1850], 8:17), the Arab use
of “Nabatean” denoted all peoples of the Ancient Near East, including the Canaanites.
(^64) See note 11, above.
(^65) Shahrastani,Kitab al- milal wa’l-nihal, 139. According to Shahrastani, Pharaoh was a
Sabian until he deviated from their religion (apparently a pun on a common etymology of
the word sabia; see ibid., 125).
(^66) See Pines, “Some Traits of Christian Theological Writing in Relation to Muslim Kalam
and to Jewish Thought,” Proceedings of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities 5
(1976): 104– 25, (reprinted in The Collected Works of Shlomo Pines, 3, Studies in the His-
tory of Arabic Philosophy, ed. S. Stroumsa, [Jerusalem 1996], 79– 99); Qirqisani,Kitab
al-anwar wa’l-maraqib, ed. L. Nemoy (New Haven, 1940– 45), 43– 44, and 214, 326,
587–88, 676; A. Funkenstein, “Gesetz und Geschichte: Zur historisierenden Hermeneutik
bei Maimonides und Thomas von Aquin,” Viator 1 (1970): 147– 78. Assmann, Moses the
Egyptian, 53; S. D. Benin, “The ‘Cunning of God’ and Divine Accommodation,” Journal of
the History of Ideas 45 (1984): 181– 85; for the broader context of the concept of accom-
modation since Late Antiquity, see S. D. Benin, The Footprints of God: Divine Accommo-
dation in Jewish and Christian Thought (Albany, 1993).
(^67) SeeRabbi Yehuda Halevi, The Kuzari: In Defense of the Despised Faith, trans. N. Daniel
Korobkin (Northvale, N.J., and Jerusalem, 1998), 38– 42, 99– 100.
(^68) Seeal-Kitab al- Khazari, 17; and see note 86, below.
(^69) As Steinschneider has suggested, Ibn Ezra relied apparently on an erroneous reading of
the Arabic, which replaced the Nabatean agriculture with Coptic; see Chwolsohn, “Über
die Überreste de altbabylonischen Literatur,” 12.
(^70) See S. Pines, “Ibn Khaldun and Maimonides, a Comparison between Two Texts,” Studia
Islamica 32 (1979): 265– 74, esp. 270. See also I. Twersky, “Did R. Abraham Ibn Ezra Infl u-
ence Maimonides?” in I. Twersky and J.M. Harris, eds., Rabbi Abraham Ibn Ezra: Studies in
the Writings of a Twelfth- Century Jewish Polymath (Cambridge, Mass. 1993), 21– 48.