Yale Prints Karaite Bible Dictionary, Lost 800 Years

A Karaite dictionary of the Bible, yielded up by the basement of a synagogue in Jerusalem after lying forgotten for 800 years, has been published by the Yale University Press and has already shed new light on the Bible.

Written in the tenth century, it is the oldest comprehensive Biblical dictionary. It was available only in manuscript form until edited by Dr. Solomon L. Skoss, professor of Arabic at Dropsie College, Philadelphia.

The dictionary, written in Arabic, but in Hebrew characters, is based on manuscripts of David ben Abraham al-Fasi, one of the Karaites, or opponents of Talmudic and rabbinical teachings. His work attained great popularity among succeeding generations of scholars. Three abridgments were made of it during the eleventh century, all now in various European libraries.

Al-Fasi and his dictionary were unknown until 1830 when an old and torn manuscript was found in an underground chamber of the Karaite synagogue in Jerusalem. It is now in the State Public Library in Leningrad. Several other fragments turned up later. Dr. Skoss investigated numerous manuscripts on a grant from the American Council of Learned Societies.

The dictionary has helped to clear up several incongruities in the Bible. In Exodus, the customary version of the golden calf account says that when the golden earrings were brought to Aaron he “received it at their hand, and fashioned it with a graving tool, and made it a molten calf.” How he could melt it with a graving tool was difficult to understand. But it now appears the word “graving tool” should be “mold.”

Dr. Skoss explained how the dictionary should have been lost to scholars for so many centuries. He said that “with a shifting westward of Jewish centers of learning” after the thirteenth century “Arabic ceased to be a medium of expression with the Jewish scholar” and Judaoo-Arabic literature “fell almost abruptly into disuse,” particularly the Karaite.