Commentaries in Rabbinic Literature

The earliest commentaries on scientific texts which we have are from Babylonia, from the 7th century BCE, and although quite brief and cryptic, and often fragmentary, they form a substantial corpus of cuneiform texts, approximately 200 manuscripts in total. Many of these commentaries concern astronomy/astrology, lexicography, divination, and medicine, the majority of which have not been edited or translated. The methodologies of Babylonian commentaries have much in common with later Greek scholiasts, Rabbinic hermeneutics, Christian exegesis, and Islamic Tafsir, which is why the Dahlem seminar series intends to examine sample texts in Akkadian, Aramaic, Greek, Latin, Syriac, Arabic, and even Chinese. Each week an expert in these fields will be asked to present a text in translation and in the original, as a basis for comparison with texts in other languages but written with similar purposes in mind, to interpret and explain science.