Copyright

Dotan Arad, Esther-Miriam Wagner

Published On

2025-07-22

Page Range

pp. 427–428

Language

  • English

Print Length

2 pages

W.8: Unidentified Work

Chapter of: 'Wisdom and Greatness in one Place': The Alexandrian Trader Moses ben Judah and his Circle(pp. 427–428)
The page is in very bad condition. The vellum is dark, rubbed and stained, and the handwriting is almost impossible to read, not helped by the fact that it is all mirrored script, left behind by other texts. The verso side is even more difficult to decipher. Due to these limitations, we could not identify the work, but we assume it is a part of an exegetical work, perhaps on Exodus. The clue for this is the sentence in the last line of the recto (l. 19): ויורהו. הורה לו לקחת עץ ‘vayorehu: he commanded him to take a log’. There is no doubt that the subject discussed here is the story of the bitter water in Exodus. The writer refers here to the verse:“and the LORD showed him a log, and he threw it into the water, and the water became sweet” (Exod. 15.25). He explains the word ויורהו not as ‘he showed him’, as some commentators understood, but rather as ‘he commanded him’. The existence of the dot after the word vayorehu reinforces the impression that this is indeed a remainder of an exegetical work. In such works, the author usually differentiates the word he is about to interpret and its commentary by a dot (whose syntactic role is equivalent to that of a colon in modern texts). The words in l. 18, which speak about a “complaint and cry,” refer perhaps to the complaint of the children of Israel and to the prayer of Moses: “And the people murmured against Moses, saying, ‘What shall we drink?’ And he cried to the LORD” (Exod. 15.24–25).

Contributors

Dotan Arad

(author)
Senior Lecturer in the Israel and Golda Koschitzki department of Jewish History and Contemporary Jewry at Bar-Ilan University
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5395-6653

Dr. Arad is a senior lecturer in the Israel and Golda Koschitzki department of Jewish History and Contemporary Jewry in Bar-Ilan University. Dotan has a PhD in Jewish History from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His research focuses on the Jews in Egypt, Syria and Palestine during the Mamluk and Early Ottoman period. Between 2012 and 2014 he published, with Prof. Shmuel Glick and other colleagues, a series of volumes containing responsa fragments of Jewish Sages in the Ottoman Empire, from the Cairo Genizah. His current research focuses on the Judeo Arabic letters of the Karaites in the Ottoman empire and on the social history of the Damascus and Cairo’s Jews during the Ottoman Period.

Esther-Miriam Wagner

(author)
Executive Director of the Woolf Institute at University of Cambridge
https://www.woolf.cam.ac.uk/people/dr-esther-miriam-wagner

Esther-Miriam Wagner is the Executive Director of the Woolf Institute. She is a Fellow of St Edmund's College and teaches the MPhil in Middle Eastern Studies: Muslim-Jewish Relations at the University of Cambridge. Miriam has written broadly on sociolinguistics, historical linguistics of Judaeo-Arabic and Yiddish, scribal practice, and Jewish-Muslim relations in Egypt and Muslim Spain as reflected in the Genizah sources. Her books include Linguistic Variety of Judaeo-Arabic in Letters from the Cairo Genizah (2010), Scribes as Agents of Language Change (2013), Merchants of Innovations. The Languages of Traders (2016) and A Handbook and Reader of Ottoman Arabic (2021). Her work has been featured on TV and Radio programmes, such as on BBC3 The Essay, in History Magazine and in documentaries on the Cairo Genizah.