Midrash ha-Gadol on Leviticus and Numbers, David Adani, [Yemen, 1594]

The present manuscript is a sixteenth-century copy of Midrash ha-Gadol on Leviticus and Numbers. The compilation of Midrash ha-Gadol is usually attributed to David ben Amram Adani, a Yemenite rabbi and scholar of the thirteenth-fourteenth century. Writing in clear, limpid Hebrew prose, Adani introduces each weekly portion with a poem in rhymed verse. The work is important not only because of the author's original contributions to the literature of halakhah and aggadah, but also because of the multitude of extracts which he incorporates from ancient tannaitic Midrashim either unknown, or only partially known, from other sources.

The colophon of this manuscript reads: Completed 3rd Tishrei 1906 according to the shetarot (Seleucid-era counting) [September 17, 1594], written for (or by) David ben Meoded al-Kisi (fol.146v). On the same page is a document in Judeo-Arabic, written in Sanaa in 1598, concerning Suleiman ben Daud ben Musa al-Damari’s pawning of the manuscript.

Sotheby’s is grateful to Menahem Schmelzer z”l and Benjamin Richler for cataloguing this manuscript.

Physical Description

246 leaves on paper, 12 1/8 x 8 ½ inches; 310 x 212 mm, text in 2 columns, 35 lines, written in black ink in Yemenite script, marginal notes, catchwords, modern pagination and foliation in pencil, quires numbered in Hebrew letters at their ends (bottom, left); beginning and end of text missing, margins reinforced on final 11 leaves. Half morocco.

Literature

Hirschfeld (ms. no. 8); Midrash ha-Gadol on Numbers, ed. Z. Rabinowitz, 1973; Midrash ha-Gadol on Leviticus, ed. A. Steinsalz, 1975; on the desirability of a new critical edition of Midrash ha-Gadol, see M. B. Lerner, in Peamim, 10, 1982, pp. 109-118 (in Hebrew)