The Early Judaeo-Persian Tafsirs of Ezekiel

The Tafsir of Ezekiel is the largest and most renowned Early Judaeo Persian text. It holds 226 pages of translation and commentary on Ezekiel 1:21-39:29. The Tafsir was written - probably in the late 10th or early 11th century CE - in two different coeval dialects of Early Judaeo-Persian. Only three fragments remain of the Small Tafsir of Ezekiel, a more succinct commentary, without translation, on select verses. The Tafsir and the Small Tafsir of Ezekiel illuminate a long-lost tradition of Mediaeval Iranian Bible commentary, which has yet to be investigated. They also shed light on certain aspects of the history of the Persian language that illustrate the nonlinearity of language evolution. The lexical facets of the corpus are invaluable to the study of Middle and New Persian on one hand, and fusion languages - particularly Jewish languages - on the other hand. Volume I of the publication consists of the text of the both tafs+rs of Ezekiel. Volume II contains the translations of these texts intoEnglish, and Volume III describes the linguistic peculiarities of this heterogeneous corpus, demonstrate their significance to Persian and Jewish linguistics, and supply a glossary for the texts.