Riddles_of_Dunash_ben_Labrat

Riddles of Dunash ben Labrat

Riddles of Dunash ben Labrat

900s CE Hebrew riddles

The riddles of Dunash ben Labrat (920×925-after 985) are noted as some of the first recorded Hebrew riddles, and part of Dunash's seminal development of Arabic-inspired Andalusian Hebrew poetry. Unlike some later Andalusian Hebrew riddle-writers, Dunash focused his riddles on everyday objects in the material world. His writing draws inspiration from the large corpus of roughly contemporary, poetic Arabic riddles.[1] The riddles are in the wāfir metre.[2]: 142 

Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania, Center for Advanced Judaic Studies Library, Cairo Genizah Collection, Halper 317, f. 2v, from the tenth to twelfth century CE. Lines 11ff. contain a twenty-line riddle attributed to Dunash ben Labrat.

Manuscripts

Riddles plausibly attributed to Dunash are known to survive in three manuscripts:[2]

Each manuscript contains some material that overlaps with the others and some unique material. Between them, they contain a total of sixteen riddles that Nehemya Aluny thought could be attributed to Dunash.

Text

The ten riddles that appear in the Philadelphia fragment are characterised by Allony as a single 'poem of twenty lines in the wâfir metre, containing ten riddles', explicitly attributed to Dunash.[2] Carlos del Valle Rodríguez later identified the metre as the similar hajaz.[6]

This poem runs as follows:

More information Riddle no., Hebrew text ...

Misattributions

Some of the riddles which in their earliest witness are attributed to Dunash are found in later manuscripts and editions attributed to other poets. The 1928-29 edition of the works of Solomon ben Gabirol by Hayim Nahman Bialik and Yehoshua Hana Rawnitzki include seven riddles, some of which appear in the Genizah fragment as Dunash's: Genizah riddle 6 appears as Ben Gabirol riddle 1; 7 appears as Ben Gabirol riddle 3; 8 appears as Ben Gabirol riddle 4; 9 appears as Ben Gabirol riddle 5; 10 appears as Ben Gabirol riddle 2.[11][2]

References

  1. [1]
    Archer Taylor, The Literary Riddle before 1600 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1948), pp. 33-35.
  2. [2]
    Nehemya Aluny, 'Ten Dunash Ben Labrat's Riddles', The Jewish Quarterly Review, New Series, 36 (1945), 141-46.
  3. [3]
    Elkan Nathan Adler, Catalogue of Hebrew Manuscripts in the Collection of Elkan Nathan Adler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1921), p. 93 [no. 3702].
  4. [4]
    B. Halper, 'Descriptive Catalogue of Genizah Fragments in Philadelphia', The Jewish Quarterly Review, 14 (1924), 505-65 (p. 508 [no. 317]).
  5. [5]
    'Halper 317 Philological essay'.
  6. [6]
    Dunash ben Labrat, El diván poético de Dunash ben Labraṭ: la introducción de la métrica árabe, trans. by Carlos del Valle Rodríguez (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas, Instituto de Filologia, 1988), pp. 225-28 ISBN 84-00-06831-9.
  7. [7]
    Nehemya Aluny, 'Ten Dunash Ben Labrat's Riddles', The Jewish Quarterly Review, New Series, 36 (1945), 141-46. Note that the vocalisation in this edition is rather indistinct, so some transcription errors in the vocalisation are likely, particularly with regard to confusion of qamets and segol.
  8. [8]
    בן-שבת, שמואל (1955). "פתרונים לחידות סתומות לר' יהודה הלוי ור' שלמה אבן-גבירול" [The Solution of Hitherto Unsolved Riddles of Yehuda Hallevi and Shelomo ibn Gabirol]. תרביץ. 25: 385-392 (390-391). JSTOR 23588346.
  9. [9]
    This solution is accepted by Rodriguez; the fairly extensive debate recorded by Aluny is also surveyed by Dan Pagis, 'Toward a Theory of the Literary Riddle', in Untying the Knot: On Riddles and Other Enigmatic Modes, ed. by Galit Hasan-Rokem and David Shulman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 81-108 (pp. 105-6 [n. 36]), who likewise settles on 'sun', citing a parallel in the epigrams of Yehuda Alharizi: 'Behold the sun, who spreads his wings over the earth, illuminating its darkness / Like a leafy tree grown in heaven, whose branches reach down to the earth'. Alaric Hall, 'Latin and Hebrew Analogues to The Old Norse Leek Riddle', Medieval Worlds, 14 (2021), 289-96, doi:10.1553/medievalworlds_no14_2021s289, supports the 'sun' interpretation.
  10. [10]
    Alaric Hall and Shamira Meghani, '"I am a Virgin Woman and a Virgin Woman's Child": Critical Plant Theory and the Maiden Mother Conceit in Early Medieval Riddles', Medieval Worlds, 14 (2021), 265-88 (pp. 272–73); doi:10.1553/medievalworlds_no14_2021s265.
  11. [11]
    אבן גבירול שלמה ב"ר יהודה הספרדי (1928–1929). ביאליק, ח. נ.; רבניצקי, ח. (eds.). שירי שלמה בן יהודה אבן. Vol. 5. תל אביבגבירול. p. 35.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
Share this article:

This article uses material from the Wikipedia article Riddles_of_Dunash_ben_Labrat, and is written by contributors. Text is available under a CC BY-SA 4.0 International License; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.