On the Beginnings of Hebrew Scientific Literature and on Studying History Through "Maqbiloṯ" (Parallels)

Y. Tzvi Langermann On the Beginnings of Hebrew Scientific Literature and on Studying History Through "Maqbilot" (Parallels) The Beginnings of Hebrew Scientific Literature My own investigations have led me to include Sefer yesirah among a group of texts that together constitute the first chapter in the history of Hebrew scientific literature. I must emphasize right away that I am not asking when Jews first began to evince an interest in science. The question I want to answer is when Jews first wrote Hebrew texts whose primary purpose was the exposition of scientific knowledge. I have found that a group of Hebrew texts affiliated with different scientific disciplines share some significant literary features—a fact that indicates that their authors worked in the same temporal and cultural milieu and decided to produce texts on science based on a certain literary model. These texts appear to have been composed in the eighth or ninth centuries , somewhere in the Middle East. Each of these texts has a weighty bundle of philological problems associated with it. Only one of them can be dated with any precision; all of them may contain several layers of accretions. Although I am not oblivious to these issues, I feel that, from the perspective of the history Aleph 2 (2002)169 of science, there is much to be gained by examining each textus receptus and looking for common features of the group. Having said this, I can now indulge in the proverbial apology for offering no more than a brief account here and, in particular, for not reviewing in detail the research that has been done on each of these texts. One final point before moving on to the texts: I shall be operating with a simple working definition of the word "science": "science" provides a factual account of the world of phenomena, whether of the cosmos in its entirety or of particular parts, such as the heavenly or human bodies. Four texts form the "hard core" of my theory: Baratta di-SemuDel, which discusses astronomy and astrology; Sefer yesirah, a cosmological work; Misnat ha-middot, on mathematics; and Yesirat ha-walad, on embryology. After describing each one separately, I will list the common literary features that bind them together historically. Finally, I will expand my analysis by introducing other texts and writers that do not fit my model but help fill in my story. Baratta di-Semu3 el I begin with the Baratta di-Semu^el (BdS) for two reasons. First, BdS meets even the most stringent positivist requirements for classification as a scientific text. Second, it is the only one of the texts that can be dated with some confidence: in the opening lines of the fifth chapter, the author or redactor gives his date as Anno Mundi 4536, that is, 776 CE. Dr. Eliahu Beller, whose recent study has clarified the technical procedures described in BdS, holds that the text contains materials that are much earlier.1 On the other hand, Dr. Gad Sarfatti has argued that the second half of the book, whose content is astrological, is in fact of later origin.2 I remind you of my caveat: even this text, which clearly displays a date, remains problematical, and scholars assign different dates to its different sections. Nonetheless, it is my opinion that 776 is a reasonable date for the textus receptus; the arguments that I have seen for assigning parts of the book to an earlier or later period are all 170 Y. Tzvi Langermann circumstantial and at best merely suggestive. No one has demonstrated that the book, in the form in which it has reached us, could not have been written in 776 or thereabouts; since this date appears in the treatise, I accept the late eighth century as the era of its composition. Dr. Beller has shown that the methods used in BdS are arithmetical, similar to those known to us from Babylonian astronomy. The topics covered include eclipse limits, oblique ascensions, the lunar phases, and shadow formulas (procedures for finding the hour of the day from the length of the shadow of the gnomon). The second half of the book contains data on the motions of the planets and their...