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Summaries 103*

The Book of the Law in the House of
the Lord is a Copy (‘nuskha’) Written
by Moses: Yefet ben ᴄElī’s
Commentary on 2 Kings 22:1 – 23:3

Meira Polliack and Ilana Sasson

Department of Biblical Studies, Tel-Aviv University

One of the main debates in the study of the history of Jewish Bible
interpretation is the question of how medieval commentators perceived the
process of redaction and compilation of the biblical text. Medieval Karaite
exegesis plays a major role in this debate, as Karaite scholars paid special
attention to matters of linguistics and structure, as well as the role of the
mudawwin (the editor, compiler, redactor, or narrator of the Bible).

Unlike other radical religious movements, which tend to appropriate or
‘reinvent’ undocumented or newly-found texts in order to advance their
ideology, the medieval Karaites did not use the account of the finding of
the scroll in the house of the Lord (2 Kings 22:1 – 23:3) as support for their
Scripturalist ideology. On the contrary, both Yaᴄaqūb al-Qirqisānī and
Yefet ben ᴄElī did not assume a breach in the transmission of the biblical
text from Moses to Josiah, and from the latter to Ezra. As this article
shows, Yefet further reduces the significance of the discovery of the scroll.
For him, the newly found scroll in the days of Josiah is a piece of physical
evidence for one of the two copies of the Book of the Law written by
Moses. Yefet contends that one of Moses’ copies was used as an ‘open
copy,’ a template, for new copies to be used by generations of kings. The
second of Moses’ copies, the newly found one, was saved untouched and
unknown in the Jerusalem Temple until the rein of Josiah. According to
Yefet, the high priest’s great astonishment upon finding the scroll stemmed
from his surprise at finding the artifact itself, not from a discovery of any