Bibliotheca Polyglotta

▪ Jeffery1938: »The Commentators knew that it was a technical Jewish title and quote as an example of its use Kaʕb al-Aḥbār¹ , the well-known convert from Judaism. It was generally taken, however, as a genuine Arabic word derived from ḥabira, to leave a scar (as of a wound), the Divines being so called because of the deep impression their teaching makes on the lives of their students; so Rāġib, Mufradāt, 104. / Geiger, 49, 53, claims that it is derived from [Hbr] ḥāḇēr ‘teacher’, commonly used in the Rabbinic writings as a title of honour, e.g. Mish. Sanh. 60b mh ʔhrn ḥbr ʔp bnyw ḥbrym ‘as Aaron was a Doctor so were his sons Doctors’.² Geiger’s theory has been accepted by von Kremer, Ideen, 226 n., and Fraenkel, Vocab, 23, and is doubtless correct, though Grünbaum, ZDMG, xxxix: 582, thinks that in coming into Arabic it was not uninfluenced by the Ar ḫabara, ʔaḫbara, ḫabīr. Mingana, Syr Influence, 87, suggests that the word is of Syr origin (see also Cheikho, Naṣrāniyya, 191), but this is unlikely. The word was evidently quite well known in pre-Islamic Arabia,³ and thus known to Muḥammad from his contact with Jewish communities. It was borrowed in the form of the singular and given can Arabic plural.«

1. The pl. form ʔaḥbār is explained by a verse in Ibn Hišām, 659, where we learn of one whose full name was Kaʕb b. al-Ašraf Sayyid al-Aḥbār. 2. Hirschfeld, Beiträge, 51, translates by ‘Schriftgelehrte’ (cf. the N.T. grammateús = Syr sprā), and takes it as opposed to the ʕm hʔrṣ. 3. It occurs in the old poetry, cf. Horovitz, KU, 63, and Ibn Hišām, 351, 354, uses the word familiarly as well known; cf. also Wensinck, Joden te Madina, 65; Horovitz, JPN , 197, 198.

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