chapter nine

The Sabbath Epistle by Abraham Ibn Ezra: its purpose and novelty

Anne C. Kineret Sittig

1. Introduction

The Sabbath Epistle by Abraham Ibn Ezra, first published in full in the 1830s (ed. Piperno 1830, ed. Luzzatto 1839), is an intriguing text about the proper time to begin observance of the Sabbath.1 In this paper I shall present the Sabbath Epistle, examine its argumentation and discuss why Abraham Ibn Ezra may have written this treatise. What is the Sabbath Epistle? From a literary perspective the text is hard to classify as even the most basic categorising questions cannot be answered unambiguously. Is it fiction or non-fiction? Large parts are non-fiction but the status of other parts remains uncertain. Is it poetry or prose? It is mostly prose but does contain a poem. Its linguistic style and its reasoning show a large variation. What is its topic? The beginning of the Sabbath is presented as its main issue but quite a few other, seemingly unrelated, topics are raised as well. Who were the intended audience? The answer remains unclear. What we do know—inter alia, from its character- istic terminology—is that its author was almost certainly the renowned Bible commentator, scholar and poet, Abraham ben Meir Ibn Ezra. Abraham Ibn Ezra’s colophons and introductory poems permit a partial reconstruction of his biography. In the context of the present paper it is relevant to know that he resided in Rouen in Northern between 1152 and 1157 (Sela and Freudenthal 2006, Kislev 2009). There he com- posed his so-called long commentary on Exodus (which contains a pas- sage on the Sabbath Epistle’s main issue) and his alternative commentary, Shita Aheret, on Genesis. From Rouen he moved to . He was then in his late sixties. In Ibn Ezra composed Yesod Mora in the sum- mer of 1158; and in the Sabbath Epistle, the topic of the present chapter,

1 The Sabbath Epistle is the topic of the author’s doctoral research. The thesis will include a critical edition of the Hebrew text, an English translation and commentary, a codicological study of its manuscripts, and a study of the transmission of the text, besides a general study and interpretation of this work. 210 anne c. kineret sittig the narrator recounts an experience that he had in England in December of that same year. Since there is no evidence that Ibn Ezra left England, it is plausible that he composed the Sabbath Epistle in England in 1158 or shortly thereafter. This incidentally makes it Abraham Ibn Ezra’s last original composition that is known to us. The Sabbath Epistle centres on the question of whether the Sabbath day should start Friday evening or Saturday morning. Ibn Ezra presents this issue at the beginning of the Sabbath Epistle, in what I, for easy reference, shall call the ‘prelude’. The narrator, who identifies himself as Abraham Ibn Ezra, relates a dream in which the personified Sabbath reprimands him for causing her to be profaned. Upon awakening, the narrator rec- ognizes that a biblical commentary on ‘There was evening, there was morning, one day’ (Genesis 1:5), which is in his library, is responsible for the offense. The commentary explained, the narrator tells us, the verse to mean that ‘the second day began with the morning, since the night follows the day’, which, when applied to the Sabbath day, may lead one to conclude erroneously that the Sabbath begins Saturday morning. The distraught narrator then swears an oath to immediately write a treatise to counter this incorrect and evil interpretation and prove that observance of the Sabbath should start Friday evening. The resulting technical exposé then comprises the rest of the Sabbath Epistle. Following the prelude, the Sabbath Epistle consists of a cosmological introduction and three chapters on the beginning of the Jewish year, month, and day, respectively. Topics raised in these chapters include a discussion on the lengths of the solar year as found in various cultures and the sources of disagreement; the proper determination of the visibil- ity of the new ; and the claim of one Judah the Persian—known only from the writings of Abraham Ibn Ezra—that the Biblical Israelites used a solar year, and the refutation of that claim. Additionally, about half of the entire Sabbath Epistle consists of biblical quotes and that do not bear on the calendar but on Hebrew grammar, linguistics and exegetical principles. For the most part, the material in the Sabbath Epistle, exegeti- cal as well as calendrical, has parallels in Ibn Ezra’s other works. The final chapter substantiates that the Sabbath day starts on Friday evening. The prelude of the Sabbath Epistle is its best known part. In fact, many people have believed the prelude to be the entire work, and twenty of the forty extant manuscripts of the Sabbath Epistle consist of the prelude exclusively. The first printed edition of the Sabbath Epistle was limited to the prelude as well, and many times it has been reprinted in isolation in various inspirational and liturgical compilations (Shulhan Aruch of Isaac