Full Description
Samuel David Luzzatto (1800-1865), known by his Hebrew acronym Shadal, was the leading Italian Jewish scholar of the 19th century. A linguist, educator, and religious thinker, he devoted his talents above all to the interpretation of the Bible, especially the plain meaning of the text. Although he was a devout believer in the divinity, unity, and antiquity of the Torah, Shadal approached the text in a remarkably free spirit of inquiry, drawing upon a wide variety of sources, ancient and contemporary, Jewish and non-Jewish. As a result, his interpretations may strike even the modern reader as fresh and novel.
Shadal’s Deuteronomy (Devarim) commentary addresses certain broad issues in depth, such as the command to "love" God—is this a philosophical love, an emotional love, or simply an effort to please God by doing what He asks? Shadal also turns his attention to fine details: for example, what was the mechanism by which Egyptian gardens were irrigated "by foot"? As a bonus, this volume features two appendices. The first is an essay about Shadal’s surprising take on Deuteronomy's law of the accused bride, and how his approach relates to a modern work of world literature. The second is a discussion of Shadal’s unusual friendship with a group of non-Jewish intellectuals in northern Italy, and how he helped some of them solve an archaeological mystery.
Shadal’s treatment of the book of Deuteronomy, as well as the other books of the Torah, consisted of his Italian translation of the text and his Hebrew-language commentary. Here, for the first time, is an all-English version of both the text translation and the unabridged commentary, the first complete edition of Shadal’s Devarim since its original printing in 1876. The publication of this fifth and final volume of Shadal on the Torah, with copious explanatory notes added, is the culmination of a fifty-year labor of love by the translator-editor.
