“The ‘Lemma Complement’ in Hebrew Commentaries from Byzantium and Its Diffusion to Northern France and Germany

Abstract

The publication of a corpus of Byzantine Jewish texts from the Cairo Genizah by Nicholas de Lange2 has provided important new data for reconstructing the history of Jewish biblical exegesis in the Middle Ages. De Lange was able to find fragments of four or five early Hebrew Bible commentaries containing Greek glosses. Three of these commentaries are sufficiently well preserved to be useful: a commentary on Ezekiel and Minor Prophets by an exegete named Reuel (around 1445 preserved lines), a commentary on Genesis and Exodus (around 230 preserved lines), and a commentary on Kings (around 300 preserved lines). The first two commentaries are Rabbanite, while the third appears to have been composed by the well-known Karaite translator, Tobias b. Moses.