Abraham ibn Ezra and the Books of Tiberias

In the Hebrew year 4919, at midnight on the Sabbath eve of the fourteenth of Tevet, Abraham ibn Ezra was asleep in a city in England. Joseph Jacobs, who translated the scene in 1893, worked out the date as 7 December 1158. Ibn Ezra described the island as the “corner of the earth,” lying in the last of the seven divisions of the inhabited world. In his dream a figure “with the appearance of a man” stood beside him holding a sealed letter, and said: “Take this letter which the Sabbath sends thee.”¹ The letter began sweetly enough. Then, in the voice of the Sabbath herself, it accused the old scholar of an unwitting sin. His pupils had brought into his house, the day before, “books of commentaries on the Law, and there it is written to profane the Sabbath eve.”²

Ibn Ezra woke angry. He dressed, washed his hands, and, because he could not light a fire on the Sabbath, carried the books outside “into the light of the moon.” Jacobs noted that the fourteenth of a lunar month was the night of the full moon. There he found an explanation of the first chapter of Genesis claiming that a day was complete only when the next morning came, so that the night belonged to the day before. If the day began at daybreak, Jacobs explained, the Sabbath too would begin at dawn, and Friday night would become ordinary time. Ibn Ezra almost tore up the book, “for I said it is better to profane a single Sabbath than allow Israel to profane many Sabbaths.” He held back for the Sabbath’s sake, and swore not to sleep after the holy day ended until he had written a long letter explaining when the day of the Law begins.³ Jacobs thought the offending book was probably the Torah commentary of Rashi’s grandson Samuel ben Meir, though he offered this only as a guess.⁴

The Sabbath Epistle is a small work, a responsum dated 1158.⁵ Even so, the scene holds nearly everything that made Ibn Ezra important to the history of the Hebrew Bible. He was a Spaniard far from Spain, carrying the learning of Arabic-speaking Jewry to communities in Christian Europe that could not read Arabic. He read every commentary with a grammarian’s suspicion, and he defended traditional practice fiercely while doubting much traditional exegesis. And he knew, better than most writers of his century, where the most accurate copies of Scripture had come from.

A Spaniard in the Corner of the Earth

Ibn Ezra had come to England that year after almost two decades of wandering. The Jewish Encyclopedia, in an article by Richard Gottheil and Wilhelm Bacher, places him in London in 1158, writing his philosophical treatise Yesod Mora for a pupil, Joseph ben Jacob, as well as the letter on the Sabbath.⁶ Jacobs printed the colophon of Yesod Mora in which the author names the place and the speed of the work. “I, Abraham, the Spaniard, son of Meir, called Ibn Ezra, began to compose this book and wrote it in the City of London, in the island of Angleterre,” it reads, and Jacobs gives the date of its completion, four weeks later, as 1158.⁷ (The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry by Tzvi Langermann describes Yesod Mora as written “very late in his life”, which fits either reading of a scholar who died in 1167.)⁸

Little else is known of his English pupil. Joseph ben Jacob of Moreil wrote a supercommentary on Ibn Ezra’s Genesis commentary, in which he said he had heard the explanation of a passage “viva voce from this sage.” Jacobs could not identify him with any known English Jew of the time, except perhaps a “Moreil” who appears with his brother “Bonenfaunt” in the Pipe Roll of 1158–59.⁹

What Ibn Ezra saw of Anglo-Jewish learning, he described in the first chapter of Yesod Mora. Jacobs printed the passage under the heading “The state of Hebrew learning among English Jews.” In it Ibn Ezra reviews the kinds of scholars he knew. He also remarks that the calendar cannot be fixed from Scripture alone, because “between Jerusalem and this island [England] there are four whole hours during which the sun lights them, as can be proved with rigid proof from astronomy.”¹⁰ It is the voice of a man who carried an astrolabe as easily as a Bible. The Jewish Encyclopedia lists his treatises on the astrolabe, on astronomical tables and on the calendar beside his commentaries and grammars.¹¹

From Spain to Rome

He was born in 1092 or 1093. On the place, the sources disagree. The Jewish Encyclopedia reports that Moses ibn Ezra, his friend and probably his kinsman, named Toledo as the home of both Abraham and Judah ha-Levi, and that Abraham himself named Toledo in one acrostic and Cordova in another work. It concludes, following the scholar Albrecht, that he was born in Toledo.¹² Langermann places his birth “in or around 1093 in Tudela,” then within the northern reaches of Muslim Spain.¹³ The New Catholic Encyclopedia leaves both possibilities open: Toledo in Castile or Tudela in Navarre.¹⁴

For the first and longer part of his life he was known as a poet. “Once in my youth I used to compose songs with which I decorated the Hebrew scholars as with a necklace,” he wrote in a lament.¹⁵ He liked to call himself “the poet,” and the opening verses of his Torah commentary still do, describing the book as “composed by Abraham the poet” and “bound by ropes of grammar.”¹⁶ His friends included Judah ha-Levi, whose conversations he later reported in his commentaries.¹⁷ Langermann thinks he probably made his living as a poet.¹⁸

The second half of his life began in flight. Langermann writes that, like many Jews, he fled Spain in the face of the Almohad onslaughts of 1140.¹⁹ The Jewish Encyclopedia adds a private grief: his son Isaac, the only one of perhaps five children known to have survived, converted to Islam. Isaac is known to have been in Baghdad in 1143, writing poems for an Arab patron, and his father mourned his conversion in two poems. One view held that Abraham left Spain partly in the hope of bringing his son back.²⁰ In an elegy on the Almohad persecutions that began in 1142, he listed the Spanish and North African towns whose communities had been destroyed.²¹

By 1140 he was in Rome. “He departed from his native place, which is in Spain, and came to Rome,” he wrote of himself in the poem that opens his commentary on Ecclesiastes.²² Over the next three decades, Langermann writes, he wandered through Europe, “spending time in Rome, Lucca, Rouen, London, and Béziers,” and nearly all his surviving writing dates from those years.²³ The Jewish Encyclopedia gives the Italian stations with dates drawn from his own colophons: Rome in 1140, Lucca in 1145, Mantua in 1145–46 and Verona in 1146–47. In Rome he wrote his commentary on Job for a pupil, Benjamin ben Joab.²⁴ One of his best-known poems summed up this wandering life: “I resided in that place as a stranger, wrote books, and revealed the secrets of knowledge.”²⁵

The Grammars He Wrote on the Road

Most of the grammatical works were written in these Italian years, and they did for Hebrew in Christian Europe what the Arabic grammars of Spain had done for the Jews of al-Andalus. The Jewish Encyclopedia lists them in order. Moznayim (“Scales”), of 1140, explains the technical terms of Hebrew grammar. He translated the work of the eleventh-century grammarian Judah Ḥayyuj into Hebrew. Sefer ha-Yesod remained unedited. Ẓaḥot (“Purity”), of 1145, on correct language, was in the Encyclopedia’s judgement “his best grammatical work.” The last was the unfinished Safah Berurah.²⁶ Christian David Ginsburg, writing in 1867, said that Ẓaḥot was written at Mantua.²⁷ The New Catholic Encyclopedia gives the titles in English as The Book of the Balance of the Holy Tongue, The Book of Purity, and The Pure Lip.²⁸

These books travelled further and faster than their author. By 1148 Moznayim had been absorbed, without acknowledgement, into the Eshkol ha-Kofer of the Karaite encyclopedist Judah Hadassi.²⁹ Ibn Ezra had debated with Karaites in Spain and knew their literature well.³⁰ Even so, his grammar ended up in the most comprehensive Karaite compendium of the century, the work of a community whose relations with the rabbinic majority are traced in the journal’s essay on Rabbanites and Karaites.

The New Catholic Encyclopedia credits him with giving Christian Europe a new kind of Hebrew. Until his time, it notes, Jewish writers of the Mediterranean world who wanted a wide readership wrote in Arabic. Ibn Ezra wrote in Hebrew instead, “and he succeeded remarkably well,” and the article quotes Cecil Roth’s verdict that he “created Hebrew prose as a medium of scientific thought.”³¹ The Jewish Encyclopedia states the point in terms of his mission: he became a propagator of the science of Judaism among the Jews of Christian Europe, who did not know Arabic, “through the versatility of his learning and through his clear and charming Hebrew style.” No work of his in Arabic survives, though he knew the language perfectly.³²

Five Ways to Read the Torah

His most influential book was the commentary on the Torah, which he called the Book of Jashar.³³ It opens with a survey of all the ways the Torah had been explained before him, and it locates each one with a geometrical image. “Those who comment on the Torah do so in one of five ways,” he begins. “If truth be likened to a dot within a circle,” the first way, that of the learned Geonim of the Islamic East, is the circumference, which goes around and comes back to where it started. They loaded their commentaries with borrowed science, and so, in his view, missed the point.³⁴

The second way belonged to those he called Sadducees, his name for the Karaites. They “think that they have reached the very point of the circle, but in reality they do not know its place.” They rejected the rabbinic tradition, interpreted the commandments however they liked, and were “ignorant of the form of Hebrew and therefore err even in grammar.” His example was the calendar. Nowhere does the Torah state the rules for setting the years or calculating the months, so a reader who rejects tradition cannot keep the festivals at all.³⁵ The third way was allegory, “the way of darkness and gloom,” which lay outside the circle altogether. Its followers treated the laws of the Torah as riddles, and the translators identify them, from Ibn Ezra’s other commentary, as Christians.³⁶ The fourth was the way of midrash, followed by the scholars of the Byzantine and Latin lands. It came close to the point, but did not rely on grammar.³⁷

The fifth way was his own. “I will not show favoritism to anyone when it comes to interpreting the Torah,” he wrote. “I will, to the utmost of my ability, try to understand grammatically every word and then do my best to explain it.”³⁸ The limits of this freedom were also clear. In his commentary on Leviticus he wrote: “We shall believe in the words of the transmitters, for they do not contradict Scripture.”³⁹ Langermann puts the balance precisely: Ibn Ezra makes it clear “that his philological tools are not to be applied against tradition, but only where there is no tradition, and, especially, where no normative practices are at stake.”⁴⁰ The Sabbath Epistle shows that principle at work. A grammatical reading of Genesis that would change when the Sabbath begins was not a matter of exegesis to him. It was an attack on practice, and he answered it as one.

The Books the Sages of Tiberias Checked

For a historian of the Masorah, one of Ibn Ezra’s most valuable remarks comes in a comment on a single letter. The commentary on Exodus printed in the rabbinic Bibles is, according to the Jewish Encyclopedia, a separate work, which he finished in 1153 in southern France.⁴¹ At Exodus 25:31, the command to make the lampstand of the Tabernacle, the Hebrew verb te‘aseh, “shall be made,” is spelled with an extra yod. Ibn Ezra explained why he trusted that spelling.

I have seen copies of Scripture which the wise men of Tiberias have examined. Fifteen of their wise men swore that they checked every word, vowel, full and deficient spelling, three times.

Abraham ibn Ezra, commentary on Exodus 25:31, trans. H. Norman Strickman and Arthur M. Silver⁴²

Then came the comparison that gives the passage its weight: “I did not find this to be the case with the books of Scripture in Spain, France, and on the other side of the sea.”⁴³ Ibn Ezra had seen manuscripts in Spain and in France, and he had travelled widely beyond them. The Jewish Encyclopedia mentions travels in North Africa and Egypt, and possibly in Palestine.⁴⁴ His testimony was that the codices checked at Tiberias were in a class of their own, and he named the details that set them apart: the words, the vowels, and the plene and defective spellings that the Masoretes counted. Only then did he give the midrashic reading of the extra yod, which the sages took as a hint of the ten lampstands Solomon would make. He turned at once to grammar, noting that if the yod is there, the form is irregular.⁴⁵

The same respect for Tiberias appears in his grammar. Ginsburg, introducing his 1867 translation of Elias Levita’s Massoreth ha-Massoreth, quoted a passage of Ẓaḥot on the two dots that distinguish the letter shin from sin. In Ginsburg’s paraphrase, it was “the custom of the sages of Tiberias to put down these points to mark the double pronunciation, and that they were the chief authorities, since from them proceeded the Massorites, from whom we obtained the whole system of punctuation.”⁴⁶ Levita himself had quoted the same sentence in 1538. In Ginsburg’s translation of Levita it reads: “This is the manner of the sages of Tiberias, and they are the foundation, for from them were the Massorites, and from them we have received all our vowel-points.”⁴⁷

In two sentences, then, Ibn Ezra set out the chain that modern scholarship still traces: from the scholars of Tiberias, to the Masoretes, to the vowel signs in every pointed Bible. The journal’s essays on the Aleppo Codex and the Tiberian standard and on the schools of Ben Asher and Ben Naphtali follow that chain from the Tiberian side.

The One Who Divided the Verses

Ẓaḥot also contains a remark on the accents that divide each verse, and Levita used it to argue about their age. Ibn Ezra, in Levita’s quotation, criticized commentators who claimed that “those who divided the verses committed blunders,” among them the Spanish exegete Moses ha-Kohen. “I am perfectly astonished at it,” Ibn Ezra wrote, “for how could the divider commit blunders if he was Ezra the Scribe? In short, after the divider there were none so wise as he was, since we see that, throughout the whole of the Scriptures, he never made a pause which is not in its proper place.”⁴⁸

Levita accepted the conclusion and questioned the detail. He was “astonished at his speaking here of one divider,” since there were certainly many, “and since Ibn Ezra himself speaks of them in the plural, in his grammar called The Balance.” Levita drew one firm conclusion: Ibn Ezra’s words “show that he was not of opinion that the accents were given on Sinai.”⁴⁹ Ginsburg added in a note that the passage had become ammunition on both sides of a later quarrel. Johannes Buxtorf used it to argue that Ibn Ezra held the vowel points to be ancient. Jean Morin used it to show that Ibn Ezra placed the Masoretes after the close of the Talmud.⁵⁰

Ibn Ezra’s own statements seem to have held both views at once. He trusted the Tiberian scholars as the source of the pointing, and he trusted the man who divided the verses as a sage of the first rank. Neither statement was a claim about Sinai. The pointed text had human authors who were nearly infallible. On that authority, and not on revelation, it could be defended against careless commentators.

Like a Camel Clothed in Silk

He did not think the Masorah was enough. In the survey of learning that opens Yesod Mora, written in London, he described the different kinds of scholars he had met, beginning with the specialists of the Masorah. Jacobs translated the passage. “Among the students of Israel there be some whose whole knowledge consists in the knowledge of the Massora, its noble signs and useful hints, the various readings,” and “the number of verses, words, and letters in each book.” Then came his verdict on them: “The Massoretic student who has learnt nothing else is like a camel clothed in silk: the silk is no use to him, and he does not suit the silk.”⁵¹

The grammarians fared little better. It became a sage to learn something of grammar, Ibn Ezra conceded, but not to spend all his days reading Ḥayyuj, Ibn Janaḥ and Samuel ha-Nagid.⁵² Others studied only Scripture and the Aramaic Targum, or only the Talmud.⁵³ Langermann summarizes the argument: there are those whose “entire wisdom” consists in masora, “the traditional inventory of letters and phonetic markings in Scripture,” and none of these groups can reach the wisdom they seek without astronomy, geometry, psychology, physics and logic.⁵⁴ The order was clear, even if the connections between the sciences were not. The Masorah was the first rung of a ladder that ended in “the secret of the soul.”⁵⁵

Jacobs found a local meaning in the order of the list. Commenting on “the precedence given here to the Massora,” he observed that three of the chief twelfth-century authorities on the traditional textual criticism of the Bible were, in his judgement, English Jews, and he named Moses ha-Nakdan and Samuel ha-Nakdan among them.⁵⁶ The journal’s essay on Elijah ha-Naqdan and the nakdanim follows the pointers of northern Europe who carried on that work after Ibn Ezra’s visit.

Provence and Northern France

Between Italy and England, and after England, Ibn Ezra lived in France. The Jewish Encyclopedia places him in Narbonne in or shortly before 1139, answering questions for David ben Joseph. Before 1155 he was in Béziers, where he wrote a book on the divine names for his patrons Abraham ben Ḥayyim and Isaac ben Judah.⁵⁷ More than a century and a half later, Jedaiah Bedersi of Béziers still spoke enthusiastically of the visit. Judah ibn Tibbon of Lunel, his contemporary, wrote of the epoch-making importance of his stay in the south.⁵⁸

In northern France he spent several years at Dreux. There he finished several of his exegetical works and, after recovering from an illness, began a new commentary on the Torah.⁵⁹ A scribal corruption of the town’s Hebrew name long misled scholars, the Jewish Encyclopedia explains. They first placed these works on the island of Rhodes, and later, following Heinrich Graetz, in Rodez in southern France.⁶⁰ The New Catholic Encyclopedia still lists “Beziers and Rodez in southern France (1155–57)” among his stations.⁶¹ Jacobs, working from a colophon that reads “Rodoz” or “Dovres,” wondered whether the Torah commentary might have been finished at Dover.⁶²

In the north he also met the family of Rashi. The Jewish Encyclopedia reports that he came into contact, perhaps at Rouen, with Rashi’s grandson Jacob Tam, and that a poem he wrote in praise of Tam’s brother, Samuel ben Meir, survives.⁶³ If Jacobs’s guess about the book carried into the moonlight is right, the brother he praised in verse was also the commentator he wanted to tear up in London. In 1160 Ibn Ezra was in Provence again, translating an astronomical work from Arabic at Narbonne.⁶⁴

Let the One Who Understands Keep Silent

Ibn Ezra’s commentaries also contain a handful of remarks so carefully worded that later readers argued over them for centuries. At Genesis 12:6, where Abraham passes through Shechem “and the Canaanite was then in the land,” he offered a cautious explanation and then a warning. “It is possible that the Canaanites seized the land of Canaan from some other tribe at that time. Should this interpretation be incorrect, then there is a secret meaning to the text. Let the one who understands it remain silent.”⁶⁵

At the opening of Deuteronomy he went further, gathering several passages into one hint. “If you understand the secret of the twelve and also that of So Moses wrote (Deut. 31:22); And the Canaanite was then in the Land (Gen. 12:6); In the mount where the Lord is seen (Gen. 22:14); and behold, his bedstead was a bedstead of iron (Deut. 3:11); then you will recognize the truth.”⁶⁶ On the last chapter of the Torah he was explicit: “I believe that Joshua wrote from this verse onward, for Moses did not write after he ascended,” adding that Joshua wrote prophetically.⁶⁷ The chapter he meant, which tells of Moses’ death and burial, runs to twelve verses.

He did the same with the Prophets. In his commentary on Isaiah, translated by Michael Friedländer in 1873, he wrote that the comforting prophecies beginning at chapter 40 refer, in his opinion, “to the coming redemption from our present exile,” and that prophecies about the Babylonian exile are included only as an illustration. He then added an aside about another prophetic book. The orthodox opinion that Samuel wrote the book of Samuel is correct, he said, only for the part up to “And Samuel died.” He left it there: “The reader will adopt the opinion which recommends itself most to his judgment.”⁶⁸ The New Catholic Encyclopedia credits him with being “the first to sense the problem of the different sources in the Pentateuch and the problem of Deutero-Isaia,” and with feeling “the necessity of veiling his thought in allusions and involved constructions.”⁶⁹

Spinoza Elucidates the Dark Hints

Five centuries later Benedict de Spinoza made these hints famous. In the eighth chapter of his Theologico-Political Treatise, published in 1670, he called “Aben Ezra” “a man of enlightened intelligence, and no small learning, who was the first, so far as I know, to treat of this opinion.” Ibn Ezra had not dared to express his meaning openly, Spinoza said, but “confined himself to dark hints which I shall not scruple to elucidate.”⁷⁰ He quoted the comment on Deuteronomy and drew the conclusion that Ibn Ezra had only implied: “it was not Moses who wrote the Pentateuch, but someone who lived long after him.”⁷¹

Spinoza offered three readings of the “mystery of the twelve.” It might mean the twelve stones of the altar on which the whole book of Moses was written, which implied a much shorter book. It might mean the twelve curses of Deuteronomy 27. Or it might mean “the last chapter of Deuteronomy which treats of the death of Moses, and which contains twelve verses.”⁷² He translated the comment on Genesis 12:6 and spelled out the meaning of the silence it recommended. If Canaan was the first to inhabit the land, then the verse excludes the time at which it was written, and “therefore it cannot be the work of Moses, in whose time the Canaanites still possessed those territories: this is the mystery concerning which silence is recommended.”⁷³ Elsewhere he cited Ibn Ezra’s view that the book of Job was translated into Hebrew from another language, and was inclined to agree with it.⁷⁴

Langermann notes that Spinoza’s reading greatly enhanced Ibn Ezra’s stature as an exegete, especially among Christians, and gave his emphasis on peshat, the plain sense founded on philology, “considerable prestige.” He also cautions that Spinoza’s view of Ibn Ezra “was not uniformly positive.”⁷⁵ The man who carried a commentary into the moonlight to protect the Sabbath was not, in his own eyes, a critic of tradition. He was a grammarian who would follow the language wherever it led, provided no law was at stake. When it led somewhere dangerous, he told the reader to keep quiet.

The Vowel-Point Quarrel

His remarks on Tiberias had a second afterlife, in the long Christian controversy over the age of the Hebrew vowel points. Ginsburg wrote that from Ibn Ezra the opinion that the points came from the Tiberian Masoretes “was also espoused by some Christian scholars in the middle ages.” Some of them, “hating the Jews,” wanted to use the late origin of the points to accuse Jews of corrupting the text. His example was the Dominican Raymond Martin, who claimed that Ben Asher and Ben Naphtali had put the points into the text around 900–960.⁷⁶ Levita’s Massoreth ha-Massoreth of 1538, the subject of a separate journal essay, then cited Ibn Ezra’s sentence in support of its own argument that the points were later than the Talmud.⁷⁷

The same sentence served Buxtorf, defending the antiquity of the points, and Morin, attacking it, as Ginsburg noted.⁷⁸ The history of that quarrel, in which Ibn Ezra’s Ẓaḥot was quoted on every side, is told in the journal’s essay on the vowel-point controversy. What he had written was more modest than either party wanted. He had said where the best pointing came from, and whom he trusted. He had not said when the signs were invented.

In the Margins of the Rabbinic Bible

His commentaries reached readers mostly through print. The Torah commentary was first printed at Naples in 1488.⁷⁹ When Jacob ben Ḥayyim edited the great rabbinic Bible for Daniel Bomberg in Venice in 1524–25, Ibn Ezra’s preface to the Pentateuch stood near the front of the first volume. In Ginsburg’s description, the five books of Moses followed with the Targums and “the Commentaries of Rashi and Ibn Ezra, which are given all round the margin,” together with the Masorah.⁸⁰ Ibn Ezra also appeared beside the Prophets with his commentary on Isaiah, and in the Writings with his commentaries on Psalms, Job, the Five Scrolls and Daniel.⁸¹ The Bomberg Bible set the man who praised the Tiberian codices on the same page as the Masorah he praised.

Print also carried a mistake. The commentaries on Proverbs, Ezra and Nehemiah printed under Ibn Ezra’s name in the rabbinic Bibles were the work of Moses Kimhi, elder brother and teacher of David Kimhi.⁸² Ginsburg called this “established beyond the shadow of a doubt,” and the Jewish Encyclopedia agrees.⁸³ The confusion is a small sign of how closely the two Spanish traditions were bound together in Provence. The journal’s essay on David Kimhi follows the family whose grammar continued the work Ibn Ezra had begun among the Jews of Christian Europe. The essay on Rashi treats the northern commentator whose midrashic method Ibn Ezra criticized.

The Last Grammar

Ibn Ezra’s final grammatical book was Safah Berurah, “Clear Speech,” a title taken from Zephaniah 3:9. The sources disagree about where he wrote it. The Jewish Encyclopedia suggests that he probably began it in Rome at the end of his life.⁸⁴ The Posen Library, introducing a new translation by Tiki Krakowski, dates it to Verona in 1146 or to the following decade in Rouen.⁸⁵ It opens by asking which language came first. Ibn Ezra dismisses the story that an infant raised in the desert by a mute nurse would speak Aramaic. “This is nonsense,” he writes, and he argues instead from the name Adam, which only Hebrew explains as coming from adamah, earth.⁸⁶

It also contains his sharpest words about Rashi. The early sages, he wrote, “knew the straight path,” and laid down that a text cannot lose its simple meaning, midrash being only an additional meaning. Later generations made midrash the root of everything, “among them R. Solomon [Rashi], who interpreted the Torah, Prophets, and Writings according to the midrash, while thinking that he was doing so according to the ‘plain meanings’ interpretation.” In reality, he wrote, there is “only one among a thousand” plain meanings in those books, “yet the scholars of our generation praise those books.”⁸⁷ The same excerpt salutes Ḥayyuj, whose eyes God opened to the silent letters that are added, dropped or exchanged in Hebrew roots.⁸⁸

According to the Jewish Encyclopedia, he wrote the book for a pupil named Solomon and left it unfinished. Its opening verse expresses the hope that it “will be a legacy of Abraham the son of Meïr, and will preserve his memory from generation to generation.”⁸⁹ The place and date of his death are uncertain. The Jewish Encyclopedia gives 28 January 1167. It suggests that if the dates in a poem at the end of his Torah commentary are right, he died in Rome, where his travels had begun. Abraham Zacuto’s statement that he died at Calahorra in northern Spain, it says, is unsubstantiated.⁹⁰ The New Catholic Encyclopedia accepts Calahorra and gives the date as 23 January 1167, “shortly after his return to his native land.”⁹¹

The Wanderer’s Witness

Ibn Ezra never edited a Bible, and he wrote no Masoretic treatise. His place in the transmission of the text rests on something else: he was a traveller who looked closely at manuscripts and wrote down what he saw. He had read copies in Spain, in France and across the sea, and he judged that the ones checked at Tiberias were better than all of them. He knew that their vowels came from the Masoretes, and he knew that a scholar who knew only the Masorah was a camel in silk. He defended the man who divided the verses as the wisest of scribes, while his own hints about the authorship of the Torah would one day help to unsettle traditional views of Scripture.

He remained a Spaniard throughout. In his comment on the festival bouquet of Sukkot, he wrote that the person who wanders from the land of Kedar to the land of Edom, from the Islamic world to Christian Europe, “will know the secret of this commandment if he has eyes.”⁹² The Jewish Encyclopedia reads the line as a glimpse of his longing for his beautiful native land.⁹³ He spent the last thirty years of his life in the land of Edom, and he brought with him a respect for the books of Tiberias that Christian Europe did not yet have.

The hub page on Abraham ibn Ezra places him among the scholars of the Masoretic tradition and its readers. Elsewhere in the journal, the essay on the Counters of the Torah goes back to the scribes whose counts of letters, words and verses he listed among the Masorah’s “noble signs and useful hints.”

Notes

1. Joseph Jacobs, The Jews of Angevin England, Documents and Records from the Latin and Hebrew Sources, Printed and Manuscript (London and New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1893), at archive.org, 35. *
2. Jacobs, Jews of Angevin England, 36–37. *
3. Jacobs, Jews of Angevin England, 37–38. *
4. Jacobs, Jews of Angevin England, 37. *
5. Richard Gottheil and Wilhelm Bacher, “Ibn Ezra, Abraham ben Meïr (Aben Ezra),” Jewish Encyclopedia (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1901–1906), at jewishencyclopedia.com. *
6. Jewish Encyclopedia, “Ibn Ezra”. *
7. Jacobs, Jews of Angevin England, 29. *
8. Y. Tzvi Langermann, “Abraham Ibn Ezra,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, first published 2006, revised 2018, at plato.stanford.edu. *
9. Jacobs, Jews of Angevin England, 30. *
10. Jacobs, Jews of Angevin England, 30–31. *
11. Jewish Encyclopedia, “Ibn Ezra”. *
12. Jewish Encyclopedia, “Ibn Ezra”. *
13. Langermann, “Abraham Ibn Ezra,” SEP. *
14. A. Brunot, “Ibn Ezra, Abraham ben Meïr,” New Catholic Encyclopedia (Detroit: Gale), at encyclopedia.com. *
15. Jewish Encyclopedia, “Ibn Ezra”. *
16. Jewish Encyclopedia, “Ibn Ezra”; Abraham ibn Ezra, introduction to the commentary on the Torah, in Ibn Ezra’s Commentary on the Pentateuch, trans. and annot. H. Norman Strickman and Arthur M. Silver (New York: Menorah, 1988–2004), at sefaria.org. *
17. Jewish Encyclopedia, “Ibn Ezra”. *
18. Langermann, “Abraham Ibn Ezra,” SEP. *
19. Langermann, “Abraham Ibn Ezra,” SEP. *
20. Jewish Encyclopedia, “Ibn Ezra”. *
21. Jewish Encyclopedia, “Ibn Ezra”. *
22. Jewish Encyclopedia, “Ibn Ezra”. *
23. Langermann, “Abraham Ibn Ezra,” SEP. *
24. Jewish Encyclopedia, “Ibn Ezra”. *
25. Jewish Encyclopedia, “Ibn Ezra”. *
26. Jewish Encyclopedia, “Ibn Ezra”. *
27. The Massoreth ha-Massoreth of Elias Levita, ed. and trans. Christian D. Ginsburg (London: Longmans, Green, Reader and Dyer, 1867), at archive.org, 45–46. *
28. Brunot, “Ibn Ezra,” New Catholic Encyclopedia. *
29. Jewish Encyclopedia, “Ibn Ezra”. *
30. Jewish Encyclopedia, “Ibn Ezra”. *
31. Brunot, “Ibn Ezra,” New Catholic Encyclopedia. *
32. Jewish Encyclopedia, “Ibn Ezra”. *
33. Jewish Encyclopedia, “Ibn Ezra”; Ibn Ezra, introduction to the Torah, trans. Strickman and Silver. *
34. Ibn Ezra, introduction to the Torah, trans. Strickman and Silver. *
35. Ibn Ezra, introduction to the Torah, trans. Strickman and Silver. *
36. Ibn Ezra, introduction to the Torah, trans. Strickman and Silver. *
37. Ibn Ezra, introduction to the Torah, trans. Strickman and Silver. *
38. Ibn Ezra, introduction to the Torah, trans. Strickman and Silver. *
39. Abraham ibn Ezra, commentary on Leviticus 23:40, trans. Strickman and Silver, at sefaria.org. *
40. Langermann, “Abraham Ibn Ezra,” SEP. *
41. Jewish Encyclopedia, “Ibn Ezra”. *
42. Abraham ibn Ezra, commentary on Exodus 25:31, trans. Strickman and Silver, at sefaria.org. *
43. Ibn Ezra on Exod 25:31. *
44. Jewish Encyclopedia, “Ibn Ezra”. *
45. Ibn Ezra on Exod 25:31. *
46. Levita, Massoreth ha-Massoreth, ed. Ginsburg, 45–46. *
47. Levita, Massoreth ha-Massoreth, ed. Ginsburg, 131–132. *
48. Levita, Massoreth ha-Massoreth, ed. Ginsburg, 125–126. *
49. Levita, Massoreth ha-Massoreth, ed. Ginsburg, 126. *
50. Levita, Massoreth ha-Massoreth, ed. Ginsburg, 126. *
51. Jacobs, Jews of Angevin England, 30–31. *
52. Jacobs, Jews of Angevin England, 30. *
53. Jacobs, Jews of Angevin England, 31. *
54. Langermann, “Abraham Ibn Ezra,” SEP. *
55. Langermann, “Abraham Ibn Ezra,” SEP. *
56. Jacobs, Jews of Angevin England, 33. *
57. Jewish Encyclopedia, “Ibn Ezra”. *
58. Jewish Encyclopedia, “Ibn Ezra”. *
59. Jewish Encyclopedia, “Ibn Ezra”. *
60. Jewish Encyclopedia, “Ibn Ezra”. *
61. Brunot, “Ibn Ezra,” New Catholic Encyclopedia. *
62. Jacobs, Jews of Angevin England, 32. *
63. Jewish Encyclopedia, “Ibn Ezra”. *
64. Jewish Encyclopedia, “Ibn Ezra”. *
65. Abraham ibn Ezra, commentary on Genesis 12:6, trans. Strickman and Silver, at sefaria.org. *
66. Abraham ibn Ezra, commentary on Deuteronomy 1:2, trans. Strickman and Silver, at sefaria.org. *
67. Abraham ibn Ezra, commentary on Deuteronomy 34:1, trans. Strickman and Silver, at sefaria.org. *
68. The Commentary of Ibn Ezra on Isaiah, trans. M. Friedländer (London, 1873), on Isaiah 40:1, at sefaria.org. *
69. Brunot, “Ibn Ezra,” New Catholic Encyclopedia. *
70. Benedict de Spinoza, A Theologico-Political Treatise, trans. R. H. M. Elwes (London, 1883), Project Gutenberg, at gutenberg.org, ch. 8. *
71. Spinoza, Theologico-Political Treatise, trans. Elwes, ch. 8. *
72. Spinoza, Theologico-Political Treatise, trans. Elwes, ch. 8. *
73. Spinoza, Theologico-Political Treatise, trans. Elwes, ch. 8. *
74. Spinoza, Theologico-Political Treatise, trans. Elwes, chs. 7, 10. *
75. Langermann, “Abraham Ibn Ezra,” SEP. *
76. Levita, Massoreth ha-Massoreth, ed. Ginsburg, 45–46. *
77. Levita, Massoreth ha-Massoreth, ed. Ginsburg, 131–132. *
78. Levita, Massoreth ha-Massoreth, ed. Ginsburg, 126. *
79. Jewish Encyclopedia, “Ibn Ezra”. *
80. 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, 6–7. *
81. Ginsburg, Jacob ben Chajim’s Introduction, 6–7. *
82. Richard Gottheil, Caspar Levias, Joseph Jacobs and S. Levy, “Ḳimḥi,” Jewish Encyclopedia (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1901–1906), section “Moses Ḳimḥi,” at jewishencyclopedia.com. *
83. Ginsburg, Jacob ben Chajim’s Introduction, 6–7; Jewish Encyclopedia, “Ibn Ezra”. *
84. Jewish Encyclopedia, “Ibn Ezra”. *
85. Abraham ibn Ezra, Book of Clear Speech (Sefer safah berurah), trans. Tiki Krakowski, in The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization, vol. 3, ed. Arnold E. Franklin (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2026), at posenlibrary.com. *
86. Ibn Ezra, Book of Clear Speech, trans. Krakowski. *
87. Ibn Ezra, Book of Clear Speech, trans. Krakowski. *
88. Ibn Ezra, Book of Clear Speech, trans. Krakowski. *
89. Jewish Encyclopedia, “Ibn Ezra”. *
90. Jewish Encyclopedia, “Ibn Ezra”. *
91. Brunot, “Ibn Ezra,” New Catholic Encyclopedia. *
92. Ibn Ezra on Lev 23:40. *
93. Jewish Encyclopedia, “Ibn Ezra”. *