A way in.

The fifty Judeo-Arabic words that show up most across Saadia's Tafsir — function words, common verbs, the cast of characters. Each card links straight into the Tafsir for a real example.

Modern Hebrew words you already use that come straight from Arabic — and how Saadia used them a thousand years ago. From yallah and sababa to ראש, אם, and כלב.

Forty Aramaic words that bridge straight to Arabic — and most of them are sitting in your weekly parashah. The interdental words (תלת, דהב, דכר) are the ones only Aramaic can teach: where Hebrew shifted its consonants, Aramaic and Arabic agree.

Arabic has one word for "the" — אל, glued to the front of the noun. Learn it, plus why אלשמס is said ash-shams, and a huge share of every page turns into "the X."

"His book" is one word: כתאב + ה. These little endings are the #1 reason a word you know looks unfamiliar — peel them off and the stem jumps back out.

Two verbs hold the Tafsir together: קאל "he said" and כאן "he was." Learn how they flex — past-tense endings, present-tense prefixes — and the narrative opens up.

Put it together. Read the first day of creation in Saadia's own Arabic — one clause at a time, word by word — then step straight into the full chapter.

A short walk through the 10th century — and the choice one rabbi made that shaped how Arabic-speaking Jews would read Torah for the next thousand years. Ends with Saadia's own words.

Saadia's preface to the Tafsir — in Judeo-Arabic alongside English. The opening, his theory of why the Torah teaches by story, and his plain statement of why he wrote this book. Most of it being published in English for the first time.