Richard Steiner, Yeshiva University

In 1996, Nicholas de Lange published his seminal Greek Jewish Texts from the Cairo Genizah. It contains 4-5 medieval Jewish commentaries on the Bible from Byzantium, written in Hebrew with Judeo-Greek glosses. In this lecture I provide an overview of my research (published and unpublished) on these commentaries, focusing on two questions: (1) Do these commentaries have anything in common beyond the language of the glosses? (2) Do they have anything new and important to teach us? My answer to the first question is a qualified "yes." The Rabbanite commentaries, unlike the Karaite ones, exhibit several shared features that appear to represent an authentically Byzantine form of Jewish exegesis, still relatively untouched by developments in the Islamic world. My answer to the second is a resounding "yes". Reuel’s commentary, in particular, contains more than its share of surprises—not only for students of Biblical exegesis, Midrash, and Jewish intellectual history but even for Semitic linguists.