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“When Karaites Reject a Law’s Literal Sense”

Mon, December 17, 8:30 to 10:00am, Seaport Hotel & World Trade Center, Skyline Room

Abstract

For Rabbanite Jews, the Karaites are heretical precisely because in their praxis they deliberately ignore the rabbinic tradition, deriving their religious laws directly from the Bible through literalistic interpretations. For their part, the Karaites reject Rabbanite laws, which seemingly contradict the plain meaning of the biblical text. And yet, there are instances in which Karaite scholars reject the literal sense of biblical commandments, or, at least, admit the possibility of non-literal interpretations. In his code, Kitāb al-anwār wa’l-marāqib, Ya‘qūb al-Qirqisānī (first half of the 10th c.) enumerates several examples, notably the injunction to inscribe God’s words on one’s doorposts (Dt 6:9, 11:20), the prohibition against taking a millstone in pawn (Dt 24:6), and the prohibition against cooking a kid in its mother’s milk (Ex 23:19, 34:26; Dt 14:21). In analyzing al-Qirqisani’s discussion and treatments by other early Karaites, I intend to show how
they favored certain non-literal readings, which they believed the context demanded. I will trace this type of interpretation to both rabbinic and earlier sectarian readings, and situate the issue within the contemporaneous Islamic context. The paper develops an avenue of research I have pursued in a different context; see “The Limits of Karaite Scripturalism: Problems in Narrative Exegesis” (2007).

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