David Kimhi and the Accurate Books

At an advanced age, probably in 1232, David Kimhi left Narbonne for Spain. He travelled as a delegate of the communities of Lunel and Narbonne, and his aim was to persuade the Jews of Castile to stand by the writings of Moses Maimonides, then under attack from rabbis in France and Spain.¹ The man he most wanted to reach was Judah Alfakhar of Toledo, a physician said to have served King Ferdinand III and a figure of great influence in his city.² Kimhi never arrived. He fell ill at Avila, on the road, and could go no further.³ Unable to continue, he wrote instead: “O Judah, thy brethren offer thee homage from afar; thou art adorned with wisdom, greatness, and modesty.”⁴

The letter did not work. Alfakhar repelled the approach, and a second letter brought an emphatic reply condemning Maimonides’ attempt to reconcile Aristotle with the Torah. The harshness with which Alfakhar treated the old scholar, the Jewish Encyclopedia notes, “aroused the outspoken disapproval even of his own friends.”⁵ Frank Talmage, Kimhi’s modern biographer, summed up the episode in one sentence: Kimhi showed his loyalty to Maimonides when, “in his seventies, he journeyed across Languedoc and Spain to defend Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed.”⁶

The journey that failed at Avila was not his first into Spain in search of something. Kimhi had travelled, Talmage writes, “considerable distances to consult reliable manuscripts such as the Sefer Yerushalmi in Saragossa and the Sefer Hilleli in Toledo.”⁷ The grammarian who would become the Hebrew teacher of half of Europe was also a reader of old books, someone who went to look at a famous codex because he wanted to know exactly how a word was written. This essay follows that side of him: the scholar of the Masorah, the student of manuscripts, and the author of the books through which the pointed Hebrew Bible was read for three centuries after his death.

A Family of Grammarians in Narbonne

David Kimhi was born in Narbonne around 1160 and died there around 1235, the youngest son of Joseph Kimhi.⁸ His father and his elder brother Moses were, in Talmage’s words, “exiles from Almohad Spain to Narbonne,” grammarians and exegetes “heavily influenced by contemporary Hispano-Jewish rationalism.”⁹ Narbonne had its own tradition of biblical study, reaching back to the eleventh-century scholar known as Moses the Preacher, and the elder Kimhis founded a school there whose best-known graduate was David.¹⁰

His father died while David was still a child, and he was brought up and taught by his brother Moses; later he supported himself by teaching Talmud to the young.¹¹ In Provence the family was known by a French name as well, and David signed or was called Maistre Petit.¹² He often called his father and brother his teachers. Hermann Strack, writing for a Protestant encyclopedia in 1910, recorded that habit, and that Joseph Kimhi’s grammar Sefer Zikkaron had given “for the first time the division of the Hebrew vowels into five long ones and five short ones,” and that Moses Kimhi’s concise grammar became generally known in its own right.¹³

The name Kimhi invited puns. It was linked with qemaḥ, flour, and later generations applied to David the saying from the Mishnah, “Without flour, no Torah.”¹⁴ A fourteenth-century manuscript of his commentary on the Prophets, then in the National Library in Madrid, points the name Qamḥi, which the Jewish Encyclopedia took to be the pronunciation used in Arabic-speaking lands.¹⁵ Narbonne itself, in the encyclopaedia’s reckoning, gave him a public role: between 1205 and 1218 he took part in judging several men from Barcelona who had dishonoured the memory of Rashi.¹⁶

Gleaning After the Reapers

Kimhi’s first and most influential work was a single book in two parts, the Mikhlol, the “Compendium.” The first part was a grammar of biblical Hebrew; the second, a dictionary arranged by roots. Later readers treated the dictionary as a separate work, the Sefer ha-Shorashim or “Book of Roots,” and the name Mikhlol came to mean the grammar alone.¹⁷

The Encyclopaedia Judaica explains what Kimhi was trying to do. The great grammars of Judah Ḥayyuj and Jonah ibn Janaḥ were long and detailed; those of Abraham ibn Ezra and of Kimhi’s own father and brother were short to the point of obscurity. The Mikhlol was meant as “a middle ground” between them.¹⁸ Its contribution lay above all in arrangement and in making the innovations of Joseph and Moses Kimhi widely known: the division of the vowels into five long and five short, the treatment of the nifʿal as the passive of the simple stem, the recognition of the dagesh lene.¹⁹ Kimhi called himself “a gleaner after the reapers,” but he made original observations too, among them a distinction between the consecutive vav and the ordinary vav of conjunction, and a willingness to accept post-biblical forms as legitimate Hebrew.²⁰

The Jewish Encyclopedia put the achievement more bluntly. Kimhi was not original, but he could not be considered “a mere compiler.” He digested his material so thoroughly, and set it out with such clarity, that “while he popularized the opinions of his illustrious forerunners, he at the same time made their works superfluous and helped to sink them into an oblivion from which they were not rescued until the nineteenth century.”²¹ The Encyclopaedia Judaica made the same point in fewer words: it was due to the Mikhlol and the Shorashim “that most of the works of his predecessors sank into oblivion.”²²

The dictionary shows him more independent than the grammar. It was based on Ibn Janaḥ, but it added fresh etymologies and comparisons with later Hebrew and Aramaic, referred constantly to the Masorah, and translated many words into the Provençal that Kimhi spoke at home.²³ A modern reader opening the Shorashim finds, among the Hebrew roots, the vernacular of thirteenth-century Languedoc.

Critics and Defenders of the Grammar

Not everyone admired the Mikhlol. The Encyclopaedia Judaica lists a line of later scholars who criticised Kimhi for being “highly unconventional as a grammarian”: Joseph ibn Kaspi, Profiat Duran, David ben Solomon ibn Yaḥya and Abraham de Balmes.²⁴ The Jewish Encyclopedia records the same attacks from Kaspi and Duran, and a defence by Elisha ben Abraham in his Magen David, printed at Constantinople in 1517.²⁵ Other advocates followed: Solomon ibn Melekh in his Mikhlol Yofi, and Elijah Levita, whose notes accompanied the Venice editions of the grammar in 1544–45 and of the dictionary in 1546.²⁶

The critics did not prevail. The very fact that later grammarians argued with Kimhi, rather than with Ḥayyuj or Ibn Janaḥ, shows how completely his books had replaced theirs. The Jewish Encyclopedia saw the cause in his gift for system: he possessed “in a high degree the power of systematization and of popular exposition.”²⁷ A grammar written for teachers in Narbonne became the standard reference of the Jewish schoolroom, and, as the next centuries would show, of the Christian university.

The Accurate Books of Toledo and Saragossa

The grammar and dictionary depended on knowing exactly what the biblical text said, and Kimhi took the question seriously enough to travel for it. Two of the model codices cited in medieval Masoretic notes appear in his writings. The Jewish Encyclopedia’s survey of Bible manuscripts records that Kimhi, in his grammar, “on Num. x. 4 says that the Pentateuch of the Hillel Codex was extant in Toledo,” and that he attested that another model book, the Codex Yerushalmi, had been for many years in Saragossa, where it was used extensively by the grammarian Ibn Janaḥ.²⁸ The Yerushalmi, the same article notes, “is often quoted in the Masorah as exhibiting a different orthography from that of the Codex Hilleli.”²⁹

The Hilleli was already a legend. Abraham Zacuto, writing his chronicle around 1500, gave it an ancient pedigree, a scribe named Hillel ben Moses ben Hillel, and a dramatic history: in 1197, during a siege of the kingdom of León, “they removed thence the twenty-four sacred books.” The codex, Zacuto wrote, “was exceedingly correct; and all other codices were revised after it.” He had seen its volumes of the Former and Latter Prophets, brought by exiles to Portugal and sold in North Africa.³⁰ The date of six hundred years before is doubtful, but the reputation was real, and Kimhi’s note is one of the earliest witnesses that the Pentateuch volume was in Toledo in his time.³¹

Kimhi was not the only one who went to Toledo to check a text. The scribe Israel ben Isaac of Toledo, whose Pentateuch of 1241 survives in the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, wrote in its colophon that he had checked his work against “the accurate copy known as Hilleli.”³² The Provençal scholar Menahem ha-Meiri, born a few years after Kimhi’s death, recorded that a respected rabbi, Samuel ha-Katan ben Jacob, had travelled from Germany to Toledo to commission a model codex with which to correct the Torah scrolls of Ashkenaz, and that the copyist chosen was “Israel ben Rabbi Isaac the Scribe.”³³ Meiri’s handbook for scribes is the subject of Kiryat Sefer and the laws of writing a Torah scroll. In the early thirteenth century Toledo was a place one went to for an accurate Bible, and Kimhi went.

He used Masoretic books as well as codices. Christian David Ginsburg, editing the introduction of the sixteenth-century printer Jacob ben Ḥayyim, noted that the independent compilation of the Masorah known as Okhlah ve-Okhlah was first quoted by that name “towards the end of the twelfth century, by David Kimchi,” together with Ibn Aknin.³⁴ The grammarian of Narbonne thus stands near the beginning of the recorded history of one of the classic Masoretic handbooks.

The Scribe’s Pen

Kimhi also wrote for scribes directly. His ʿEt Sofer, “The Scribe’s Pen,” abridged material from the Mikhlol into a manual for copyists of the Bible. The Encyclopaedia Judaica explains that it was “necessitated by widespread ignorance among scribes and the proliferation of biblical manuscript traditions in the 12th century,” and that it treats in detail such problems as the qere and ketiv and the accents.³⁵ The Jewish Encyclopedia describes it as containing “rules for the writing of Bible-rolls, Masoretic notes, and accents.”³⁶ It was not printed until 1864.³⁷

The commentaries show the same concern in passing. At the opening of his commentary on the second Psalm, Kimhi stops to discuss whether “Why do the nations rage” begins a new psalm, as it does “in all the more accurate books,” or continues the first, as some talmudic sages held.³⁸ The appeal to “accurate books” is a reflex of the Masoretic world in which he worked, where the division of a text could be settled by consulting the best copies. Talmage’s summary is that Kimhi’s commentaries “evince great interest in masoretic questions.”³⁹

Why the Margins Differ from the Text

The most daring idea Kimhi contributed to the history of the Masorah concerns the qere and ketiv, the places where the consonants of the text are read aloud as a different word, with the word to be read noted in the margin. Rabbinic tradition, as Jacob ben Ḥayyim would insist three centuries later, treated many of these as a law given to Moses at Sinai.⁴⁰ Kimhi proposed a historical explanation instead, in the introduction to his commentary on the Former Prophets.⁴¹

It appears that these marginal and textual readings originated because the sacred books were lost and scattered about during the Babylonian captivity, and the sages who were skilled in the Scriptures were dead.

David Kimhi, introduction to the Former Prophets, trans. Christian D. Ginsburg⁴²

In Ginsburg’s translation, Kimhi went on: “Whereupon the men of the Great Synagogue, who restored the law to its former state, found different readings in the books, and adopted those which the majority of copies had, because they, according to their opinion, exhibited the true readings. In some places they wrote down one word in the text but did not punctuate it, or noted it in the margin but omitted it from the text.”⁴³ The Encyclopaedia Judaica paraphrases the theory in the same terms: the qere and ketiv “developed out of a confusion of readings in the time of the men of the Great Synagogue who, according to him, established the text.”⁴⁴

The theory reads the Masoretic margin as the trace of a collation. The men of the Great Assembly, faced with disagreeing copies, followed the majority where they could and recorded the alternatives where they could not. It is the method that the rabbinic story of the three scrolls in the Temple court attributes to the scribes of an earlier age, the subject of the counters of the Torah and the three scrolls of the Temple court. Kimhi applied it to the whole system of marginal readings.

The idea scandalised some of his successors. Jacob ben Ḥayyim, introducing the second rabbinic Bible printed by Daniel Bomberg in Venice in 1524–25, quoted Kimhi in full and declared: “What surprises me still more is, that so holy a man as Kimchi should also utter similar things.”⁴⁵ He quoted as well the objections of Don Isaac Abravanel: if Ezra had been unsure which reading was right and put one in the margin and one in the text, why should readers “always follow the Keri, and not the Kethiv,” and why should the vowels always agree with the marginal reading?⁴⁶ Jacob ben Ḥayyim answered that the qere and ketiv were Mosaic, and argued that if they had been doubtful readings, the scribes would have treated them as they treated the three disputed readings of Tractate Soferim, by following the majority.⁴⁷ The debate between a historical and a revealed origin for the margins of the Bible, which still continues in modern scholarship, thus began with a paragraph by Kimhi and its rebuttal in the printed rabbinic Bible. That Bible’s history is told in Daniel Bomberg’s Venice press and the rabbinic Bibles.

A Commentary in the Plain Sense

Kimhi’s commentaries began, according to the Encyclopaedia Judaica, with Chronicles, a book few had explained. He wrote it at the request of a student of his father who wanted an exposition “in accordance with the plain sense or derekh ha-peshat” instead of the homiletic commentaries then prevalent.⁴⁸ Genesis followed, then all the prophetic books and the Psalms.⁴⁹ His avowed aim, Talmage writes, was to follow Ibn Ezra and his own father and brother in establishing a peshaṭ “based on philological and contextual analysis,” with particular attention to syntax within verses and the sequence of narrative.⁵⁰

He did not, however, throw out the midrash. Unlike his predecessors, the Encyclopaedia Judaica observes, Kimhi “relied heavily on rabbinic literature,” distinguishing between interpretation that met his standards of plain sense and homiletical readings, “many of which he included nonetheless for added interest.”⁵¹ In the Encyclopedia of Religion Talmage lists three reasons: some midrashim helped to explain the plain sense, some served as a foil, and some added “interest and liveliness to his text.”⁵²

The opening of the Psalms commentary shows the method. Kimhi begins with grammar, explaining why the first word, ashre, “Happy,” is always plural: a person is not called happy “for one good which is found in him,” but for many.⁵³ Then he turns to meaning: the psalm describes “the law of man” and the reward of the righteous, and David put it first because it is “exceedingly important.”⁵⁴ On the second psalm he refuses to invent a chronology: “we cannot explain the arrangement of the Psalms according to the historical order.”⁵⁵ He then reads the psalm against a concrete moment in the books of Samuel: David composed it “in the opening of his reign, when the nations were gathered against him,” as when the Philistines heard that he had been anointed and came up to seek him; the raging of the nations is the noise of their gathering, and the word ragheshu, he notes, has the sense of a great multitude, as the Targum’s rendering of another verse confirms.⁵⁶ At the end he allows the reader a choice between two plain readings, of David or of the King Messiah.⁵⁷ On Psalm 22 he explains that in “a tearing and roaring lion,” the word lion “lacks the kaph of comparison,” citing parallels from the blessings of Jacob.⁵⁸

The rationalism that drew him to Maimonides appears throughout. He generally explained miracles naturally, followed Maimonides on prophecy and providence, and wrote two “esoteric” commentaries, on the account of creation and on the chariot vision of Ezekiel, modelled on the Guide of the Perplexed.⁵⁹ He went somewhat further than Maimonides in recognising that a gentile could be a prophet, and he suggested, independently, that an animal could come under individual providence when its actions helped or harmed a human being.⁶⁰ Such passages, intended to whet the appetite of the general reader for philosophy, drew censure from later authorities, beginning with Judah Alfakhar, the man to whom he wrote from Avila, and continuing with David ibn Abi Zimra and Jacob Emden. Yet Immanuel of Rome, himself given to allegory, found Kimhi not rationalist enough.⁶¹

The commentaries preserve something else of value to students of the text. Kimhi quoted the Aramaic Targumim constantly, and the Jewish Encyclopedia noted that these “numerous quotations” furnish valuable material for a critical edition of the Targumim themselves.⁶² A thirteenth-century commentator, reading the Bible with its Aramaic translation open beside it, became a witness to the text of that translation.

Answers for the Christians

The Psalms commentary is also a work of controversy. Kimhi addressed Jewish readers who lived among Christians and were expected to answer Christian readings of their own Bible. At the end of his long discussion of Psalm 2, after taking apart the reading of “Thou art My son, this day have I begotten thee” as a statement about Jesus, he writes: “Behold I have taught you what to reply to them in this Psalm, and you can add of your own after the tenor of these words.”⁶³ At the end of Psalm 22 he answers the Christian reading of “My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?” point by point, and concludes with an observation from his own world: the psalm speaks of all the kindreds of the nations, “while, as you see, the Jews and the Mohammedans do not believe in him.”⁶⁴

The Encyclopaedia Judaica’s survey of the polemics shows how much of the argument was textual. Kimhi attacked some Christian interpretations by “demonstrating Christian ‘corruption’ of the text,” among them Psalm 22:17 and Psalm 110:1, others by showing that a verse could not apply, and still others by their irrationality.⁶⁵ Much of this material came from his father’s Sefer ha-Berit.⁶⁶ Its fate shows its force. The polemical passages were cut by censors from later printings and survive in manuscript, and they were collected and printed separately as Teshuvot la-Noẓerim, “Answers to the Christians,” in Altdorf in 1644.⁶⁷

Talmage saw a personal note in the commentaries as well. Kimhi’s depiction of exile and redemption “in terms of darkness and light,” a theme he developed at length, “was prompted by his sensitivity to the tribulations of Israel brought about by internal division and external oppression.”⁶⁸ The image is visible in his reading of Psalm 22, where the “hind of the morning” is the congregation of Israel, whose name means brightness, “and now she is in darkness in this exile, as if forgotten and abandoned.”⁶⁹

Three Hundred Books at a Stroke

Kimhi died around 1235, but his books had a second life that he could not have imagined. In 1477, probably in Bologna, a group of Jewish printers finished an edition of the Psalms with his commentary. Ann Brener of the Library of Congress calls it “the first printed book with any portion of the Hebrew Bible.”⁷⁰ The printers ended it with a six-line poem that she translates in full: “On completing the books set in typeface quire by quire, / One job and behold! three hundred books to admire: / Psalms with Kimhi’s glosses shining like sapphires.”⁷¹

The pun was old. The Hebrew for book, sefer, and sapphire, sapir, had been played on by the poets of Muslim Spain, and the printers carried the image from manuscript to type.⁷² What was new was the number: three hundred copies at once. The poem’s last lines express the hope that such books “will enable every generation to learn and acquire,” a hope that Brener reads against the persecution of Spanish Jewry and the burning of Hebrew books in the same decades.⁷³ The first Hebrew Bible text ever printed came wrapped in Kimhi’s commentary, as if the printers could not imagine the Psalms without him.

The other commentaries followed quickly. The Former Prophets with his commentary appeared at Guadalajara in 1482, the Latter Prophets at Soncino in 1485, and from 1516 all his commentaries except those on Chronicles and the Haftarot appeared, with various omissions, in every rabbinic Bible.⁷⁴ The Sefer ha-Shorashim was printed in Italy before 1480, and the grammar in the sixteenth century, later with notes by Elijah Levita.⁷⁵ The rabbinic Bible, in its sixteenth-century form and in modern editions such as Miqraot Gedolot HaKeter, set Kimhi beside Rashi and Ibn Ezra on the page.

The Teacher of Christian Hebraists

The same clarity that made Kimhi a schoolbook for Jews made him a textbook for Christians. The Encyclopaedia Judaica states that his influence on the Christian Hebraists of the Renaissance “was profound”: Johann Reuchlin’s Rudimenta linguae Hebraicae and his lexicon of 1506, and Santes Pagninus’s Institutiones of 1520 and Thesaurus of 1529, “are basically reworkings of Kimhi,” while Sebastian Münster’s writings “betray his influence heavily.”⁷⁶ The Jewish Encyclopedia agreed that Pagninus’s books were “essentially nothing else but elaborations” of the Mikhlol.⁷⁷ Strack added that a major German grammar of the 1880s, Eduard König’s, had been compiled “in constant dependence upon Qimchi.”⁷⁸

The influence reached the English Bible. The Jewish Encyclopedia claimed that the influence of his commentaries “is evident on every page,” citing Israel Abrahams; Talmage, more cautiously, called it “unmistakable.”⁷⁹ Ginsburg, writing in Victorian England, summed him up in a footnote as a man who “may be regarded as the teacher of Hebrew of both Jews and Christians throughout Europe.”⁸⁰ The scholar who could not reach Toledo in 1232 was read three centuries later by the translators of Christian Europe.

Flour for the Torah

Kimhi was not a Masorete in the strict sense. He did not point a codex or write a Masorah parva in its margins, so far as the sources show. But his work belongs to the history of the Masoretic text in at least three ways. He went to look at the model codices, the Hilleli in Toledo and the Yerushalmi in Saragossa, and recorded where they were.⁸¹ He wrote a manual for scribes, because he believed that ignorant copyists and multiplying manuscript traditions endangered the text.⁸² And he offered a historical account of the qere and ketiv that put the Masoretic margin into the history of the Bible, provoking a debate that the printed rabbinic Bible would carry across Europe.⁸³

His grammar and dictionary, meanwhile, made the pointed text readable. A Bible furnished with vowels and accents by the Masoretes needed a guide to its forms and roots, and for three centuries Jews and Christians alike used Kimhi’s. The pun on his name, “Without flour, no Torah,” was meant as praise of his learning.⁸⁴ It also describes his place in the transmission of the text: the plain, necessary food of every reader who opened a Hebrew Bible.

The hub page on David Kimhi sets him on the map of Provence beside Abraham ibn Ezra, whose method he followed, and Rashi, whose memory he defended. Elsewhere in the journal, Christian David Ginsburg traces the scholar who translated his argument about the margins, and the nakdanim follows the pointers of northern Europe who were his contemporaries.

Notes

1. Richard Gottheil, Caspar Levias, Joseph Jacobs and S. Levy, “Ḳimḥi,” Jewish Encyclopedia (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1901–1906), section “David Ḳimḥi,” at jewishencyclopedia.com; “Kimhi, David,” Encyclopaedia Judaica (Jerusalem: Keter, 1971), 10:1001–1004, reproduced by the Center for Online Judaic Studies at cojs.org. *
2. Meyer Kayserling, “Alfakar,” Jewish Encyclopedia (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1901–1906), at jewishencyclopedia.com. *
3. Jewish Encyclopedia, “Ḳimḥi”. *
4. Jewish Encyclopedia, “Alfakar”. *
5. Jewish Encyclopedia, “Alfakar”. *
6. Frank Talmage, “Kimḥi, David,” in Encyclopedia of Religion, 2nd ed., ed. Lindsay Jones (Detroit: Macmillan Reference, 2005), at encyclopedia.com. *
7. Talmage, “Kimḥi, David,” ER. *
8. Jewish Encyclopedia, “Ḳimḥi”. *
9. Talmage, “Kimḥi, David,” ER. *
10. Talmage, “Kimḥi, David,” ER. *
11. Jewish Encyclopedia, “Ḳimḥi”. *
12. Jewish Encyclopedia, “Ḳimḥi”; Encyclopaedia Judaica, “Kimhi, David”. *
13. Hermann L. Strack, “Kimchi,” in The New Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge, vol. 6 (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1910), at ccel.org. *
14. Jewish Encyclopedia, “Ḳimḥi”; Encyclopaedia Judaica, “Kimhi, David”. *
15. Jewish Encyclopedia, “Ḳimḥi”. *
16. Encyclopaedia Judaica, “Kimhi, David”. *
17. Jewish Encyclopedia, “Ḳimḥi”; Encyclopaedia Judaica, “Kimhi, David”. *
18. Encyclopaedia Judaica, “Kimhi, David”. *
19. Encyclopaedia Judaica, “Kimhi, David”. *
20. Encyclopaedia Judaica, “Kimhi, David”. *
21. Jewish Encyclopedia, “Ḳimḥi”. *
22. Encyclopaedia Judaica, “Kimhi, David”. *
23. Jewish Encyclopedia, “Ḳimḥi”. *
24. Encyclopaedia Judaica, “Kimhi, David”. *
25. Jewish Encyclopedia, “Ḳimḥi”. *
26. Encyclopaedia Judaica, “Kimhi, David”; Jewish Encyclopedia, “Ḳimḥi”. *
27. Jewish Encyclopedia, “Ḳimḥi”. *
28. Emil G. Hirsch and Isaac Broydé, “Bible Manuscripts,” Jewish Encyclopedia (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1901–1906), sections “Codex Hilleli” and “Codex Yerushalmi,” at jewishencyclopedia.com. *
29. Jewish Encyclopedia, “Bible Manuscripts”. *
30. Jewish Encyclopedia, “Bible Manuscripts”. *
31. Jewish Encyclopedia, “Bible Manuscripts”. *
32. Sotheby’s, Important Judaica, New York, 2018, lot 213, “An Extremely Rare Medieval Torah Scroll from Spain,” catalogue essay, at sothebys.com. *
33. Sotheby’s 2018, lot 213. *
34. Jacob ben Chajim ibn Adonijah’s Introduction to the Rabbinic Bible, Hebrew and English, ed. and trans. Christian D. Ginsburg (London: Longmans, Green, Reader and Dyer, 1867), at archive.org. *
35. Encyclopaedia Judaica, “Kimhi, David”. *
36. Jewish Encyclopedia, “Ḳimḥi”. *
37. Encyclopaedia Judaica, “Kimhi, David”. *
38. David Kimhi, commentary on Psalm 2, trans. R. G. Finch (London, 1919), at sefaria.org. *
39. Talmage, “Kimḥi, David,” ER. *
40. Ginsburg, Jacob ben Chajim’s Introduction, 42–43. *
41. Encyclopaedia Judaica, “Kimhi, David”; Ginsburg, Jacob ben Chajim’s Introduction, 43. *
42. Ginsburg, Jacob ben Chajim’s Introduction, 43. *
43. Ginsburg, Jacob ben Chajim’s Introduction, 43. *
44. Encyclopaedia Judaica, “Kimhi, David”. *
45. Ginsburg, Jacob ben Chajim’s Introduction, 43. *
46. Ginsburg, Jacob ben Chajim’s Introduction, 42. *
47. Ginsburg, Jacob ben Chajim’s Introduction. *
48. Encyclopaedia Judaica, “Kimhi, David”. *
49. Encyclopaedia Judaica, “Kimhi, David”; Jewish Encyclopedia, “Ḳimḥi”. *
50. Talmage, “Kimḥi, David,” ER. *
51. Encyclopaedia Judaica, “Kimhi, David”. *
52. Talmage, “Kimḥi, David,” ER. *
53. David Kimhi, commentary on Psalm 1, in R. David Kimhi on the First Book of Psalms, trans. R. G. Finch (London, 1919), at sefaria.org. *
54. Kimhi on Ps 1, trans. Finch. *
55. Kimhi on Ps 2, trans. Finch. *
56. Kimhi on Ps 2, trans. Finch. *
57. Kimhi on Ps 2, trans. Finch. *
58. David Kimhi, commentary on Psalm 22, trans. R. G. Finch (London, 1919), at sefaria.org. *
59. Encyclopaedia Judaica, “Kimhi, David”; Talmage, “Kimḥi, David,” ER. *
60. Encyclopaedia Judaica, “Kimhi, David”. *
61. Encyclopaedia Judaica, “Kimhi, David”. *
62. Jewish Encyclopedia, “Ḳimḥi”. *
63. Kimhi on Ps 2, trans. Finch. *
64. Kimhi on Ps 22, trans. Finch. *
65. Encyclopaedia Judaica, “Kimhi, David”. *
66. Encyclopaedia Judaica, “Kimhi, David”. *
67. Encyclopaedia Judaica, “Kimhi, David”; Talmage, “Kimḥi, David,” ER; Jewish Encyclopedia, “Ḳimḥi”. *
68. Talmage, “Kimḥi, David,” ER. *
69. Kimhi on Ps 22, trans. Finch. *
70. Ann Brener, “Words like Sapphires: 15th-Century Hebrew Books at the Library of Congress,” 4 Corners of the World, Library of Congress, 2021, at blogs.loc.gov. *
71. Brener, “Words like Sapphires”. *
72. Brener, “Words like Sapphires”. *
73. Brener, “Words like Sapphires”. *
74. Jewish Encyclopedia, “Ḳimḥi”. *
75. Jewish Encyclopedia, “Ḳimḥi”; Encyclopaedia Judaica, “Kimhi, David”. *
76. Encyclopaedia Judaica, “Kimhi, David”. *
77. Jewish Encyclopedia, “Ḳimḥi”. *
78. Strack, “Kimchi”. *
79. Jewish Encyclopedia, “Ḳimḥi”; Talmage, “Kimḥi, David,” ER. *
80. Ginsburg, Jacob ben Chajim’s Introduction, 43 n. 14. *
81. Talmage, “Kimḥi, David,” ER; Jewish Encyclopedia, “Bible Manuscripts”. *
82. Encyclopaedia Judaica, “Kimhi, David”. *
83. Ginsburg, Jacob ben Chajim’s Introduction, 43. *
84. Jewish Encyclopedia, “Ḳimḥi”. *