Page 183 - GQ 12

48* SUMMARIES

Four parallel discussions by Saadya
on the Resurrection: comparative
observations

Haggai Ben-Shammai

The Department of Arabic Language and Literature,
The Hebrew University

In the corpus of writings by Saadya, four discussions of the Resurrection
have come down to us. In chronological order these are:

1) In his commentary on Ex. 15, Saadya included a commentary on a
number of “songs” in Prophets, the last of which is the Song of the Ultimate
Redemption of Israel (Is. 26:1-19). Verse 19 is, for Saadya, the most
important Biblical proof text for the belief in the Resurrection. A critical
edition of his commentary on this verse in the Judaeo-Arabic original with
an annotated Hebrew translation is published here. This text was probably
written in the late 920’s, and, in any case, before Kitāb al-amānāt.

2-3) Saadya’s philosophical summa, Kitāb al-amānāt wa-ʾl-iʿtiqādāt
(Beliefs and Opinions) written in 933, survived in two almost complete
manuscripts (as well as in a large number of fragments of various sizes):
one in the Russian National Library, the other in the Bodleian Library.
The former is probably the oldest copy extant and the closest to Saadya’s
final version. Almost all Genizah fragments of the Judaeo-Arabic text, as
well as the Hebrew translation by Judah Ibn Tibbon, are much closer to the
St. Petersburg MS than to the Oxford MS. The 7th part of the book, on the
Resurrection, has two quite different versions in the two MSS. The article
contains a table comparing epitomes of both versions. In his later years,
Saadya may have written the St. Petersburg version as an independent
treatise, and then decided that this version – much superior from a methodic
and scientific point of view, should be integrated into the summa, superseding
the earlier version.