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Saadiah Gaon’s Arabic Bible Translation and Its Antecedents

Among the many accomplishment of the 10th-century sage Saadiah Gaon—one of the leading rabbinic authorities of his day—was a translation of the Torah and a few other biblical books into Arabic, along with a commentary. Although not the first to attempt to render the Bible into that language, he was the first Jew to do so. Harry Freedman explains some of Saadiah’s influences:

Nothing remains of [the Arabic-speaking Christian scholar] Hunayn ibn Ishaq’s [earlier] biblical translations, although it is likely that subsequent Arabic Bible manuscripts were based on his. Saadiah almost certainly drew on his scholarship, but only after it had been refracted through the prism of the literary critic and philologist ibn Qutayba.

Islamic writers and intellectuals of [Saadiah’s] time placed great emphasis on the literary economy of language. They frowned on the use of unnecessary words or phrases and on superfluous repetition. That the Hebrew Bible contained such apparently unnecessary material offered ammunition for the Muslim accusation that the Jews had falsified the Bible. Ibn Qutayba had ameliorated Hunayn’s classic Arabic translation by converting repeated names into pronouns and deleting phrases that seemed redundant. Saadiah’s Tafsir, as his translation came to be known, displays similar stylistic alterations.

Read more at Bible and Interpretation

More about: Arabic literature, Hebrew Bible, History & Ideas, Islam, Saadiah Gaon, Translation

The Summary: 10/7/20

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.

Read more at Mosaic