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.
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
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]
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
^Archer Taylor, The Literary Riddle before 1600 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1948), pp. 33-35.
^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.
^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.
^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.