Jewish Concepts of Scripture

(Grace) #1

100 Meira Polliack


Oxford University Press, 2001); Uriel Simon, Four Approaches to the Book of
Psalms: From Saadiah Gaon to Abraham ibn Ezra (Albany: SUNY Press, 1991).



  1. “Late” midrashic compilations dated in the eighth and ninth centuries, such
    as Pirqe de-Rabbi Eliezer, oft en retell the biblical story, thus refl ecting a transition
    in the Jewish literary tradition from anthological rabbinic collections to coherent
    works by individual authors.

  2. See Meira Polliack, “Wherein Lies the Pesher? Re-questioning the Connec-
    tion between the Medieval Karaite and Qumranic Modes of Biblical Interpreta-
    tion,” Jewish Studies, an Internet Journal 4 (2005): 151 – 200; Eve Karkovski, “Many
    Days without the Truth: Loss and Recovery of Religious Knowledge in Early Kara-
    ite Exegesis,” in Joel L. Kraemer and Michael G. Wechsler, eds., Pesher Nahum:
    Texts and Studies in Jewish History and Literature from Antiquity through the Mid-
    dle Ages, Presented to Norman Golb (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012).

  3. See Mordechai Z. Cohen, “ ‘Th e Best of Poetry’: Literary Approaches to the
    Bible in the Spanish Peshat Tradition,” Torah U-Madda 6 (1995 – 96): 15 – 57.

  4. See Geoff rey Khan, Th e Early Karaite Tradition of Hebrew Grammatical
    Th ought: Including a Critical Edition, Translation and Analysis of the Diqduq of Abu
    Ya’qub Yusuf ibn Nuh. on the Hagiographa (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2000).

  5. See, for instance, Mordechai Z. Cohen, “Th e Aesthetic Exegesis of Moses Ibn
    Ezra,” Hebrew Bible/Old Testament: Th e History of Its Interpretation, ed. M. Sæbø
    (Göttingen, Germany: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2000), I/2:282 – 301.

  6. See Stock, Implications of Literacy, 3 (and further discussion on 4 – 57).

  7. Nevertheless, it appears from various sources (exegetical, halakhical, and
    documentary) that Karaism did have an appeal to medieval (and especially to the
    literate) Jewish women by way of off ering them an opportunity for positive in-
    volvement in their creed (an issue that deserves a separate study).

  8. See Polliack, “Medieval Karaism,” 312 – 15.

  9. See ibid., 316 – 19.

  10. See Haggai Ben Shammai, “Th e Tension between Literal Interpretation
    and Exegetical Freedom: Comparative Observations on Sa‘adya’s Method,” in J. D.
    McAuliff e, B.  D. Walfi sh, and J.  W. Goering, eds., With Reverence for the Written
    Word: Medieval Scriptural Exegesis in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (Oxford: Ox-
    ford University Press, 2003), 33 – 50.

  11. See, in this context, Michael G. Wechsler, Strangers in the Land: Th e Judaeo-
    Arabic Exegesis of Tanhum ha-Yerushalmi on the Books of Ruth and Esther (Jerusa-
    lem: Hebrew University Magnes Press, 2009).

  12. See Khan, Early Karaite Tradition, 12, 132 – 133.

  13. See Meira Polliack, “Karaite Conception of the Biblical Narrator (Mudaw-
    win),” in J. Neusner and A.  J. Avery-Peck, eds., Encyclopaedia of Midrash, vol. 1
    (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2005), 350 – 74; Meira Polliack, “Th e ‘Voice’ of the Nar-
    rator and the ‘Voice’ of the Characters in the Bible Commentaries of Yefet ben ‘Eli,”
    in C. Cohen et al., eds., Birkat Shalom: Studies in the Bible, Ancient Near Eastern

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