A Lost Hebrew Verb and the Lost Tribes of Israel in a Lost Biblical Commentary from Byzantium

Abstract

This lost work – the earliest surviving peshaṭ commentary written outside of the Islamic empire – preserves a number of lost cultural artifacts of ancient and medieval Judaism: (1) a lost ancient Hebrew verb; (2) the lost contours of a complex midrash known hitherto only from fragments scattered throughout ancient Rabbinic literature; (3) an all-but-lost tradition about Israel’s “lost tribes”; (4) a lost set of the earliest non-eschatological interpretations of potentially messianic prophecies; (5) lost details of an ancient theory of biblical redaction; and (6) a lost set of the earliest examples of the (unmotivated) “lemma complement.” This article will deal with (1), (2), (3) and (4); (5) and (6) have been adequately investigated elsewhere.5 (from Introduction)