A digital reader & lexicon
The medieval Judeo-Arabic library, read in the original.
Saadia Gaon's Tafsir on the whole Pentateuch and a growing shelf of classical prose — Bahya, Rambam, Halevi, Qirqisani — each presented in the Hebrew-script Arabic original with parallel Hebrew and English and a tap-to-define lexicon drawn from Lane and Blau. New to the script? A three-stage path for Hebrew readers starts at the alphabet.
- 81,225
- words indexed
- 20,280
- lexicon entries
- 2,388
- Arabic roots
- 5 / 5
- books of the Torah
across 187 Tafsir chapters
glossed from Lane & Blau
represented in the lexicon
complete, verse-by-verse
Preview · Reader
Saadia, Bereshit 1:1
↓ tap any word for a gloss
אול מא כ׳לק אללה. אלסמאואת ואלארץ׳
Translation
“The first thing God created: the heavens and the earth.”
Saadia begins his Tafsir not with a calque of Hebrew בראשית, but with an Arabic construction — אול מא כ׳לק — that resolves the verse's syntactic ambiguity in the act of translating it.
The Curriculum
Foundations
Hebrew letters as Arabic phonemes (the diacritics, the article אל), the Hebrew–Arabic and Aramaic–Arabic cognates you already know, and the 50 words that show up most across Saadia's Tafsir.
אללה · ראש · תלת · כ׳לק
Tafsir Reader
Read Saadia's Tafsir across the whole Pentateuch alongside the biblical Hebrew. Tap any Judeo-Arabic word for a Lane-based gloss; toggle Arabic-script, Hebrew translation, and English.
אול מא כ׳לק אללה
The Library
Classical Judeo-Arabic prose with parallel Hebrew and English. Bahya's Chovot HaLevavot, Rambam's Moreh Nevukhim, Saadia's Emunot v'Deot, Qirqisani's Anwar, and Halevi's Kuzari are live; Yefet ben Eli is on the way.
תוחיד · אמאנאת · דלאלה · אנואר