Joseph Solomon Delmedigo · 1629
Read the translation (PDF) · Editorial footnotes (PDF)
A wide-ranging Hebrew scientific compendium, framed as a reply to questions put by the Karaite scholar Zerah ben Nathan. It ranges across mathematics, astronomy, physics, and metaphysics, and is among the most ambitious Hebrew scientific books of its age.
The structure is the frame: twelve major questions — the “springs” of Elim, after the twelve springs at the biblical Elim — and seventy minor ones, answering the seventy palms of the same verse, followed by appended treatises. The question-and-answer form is not decoration. Zerah ben Nathan was a real correspondent, and the book takes its shape from what he actually wanted to know.
The content is dense with geometric demonstrations, worked numeric problems, and astronomical and trigonometric tables. Two things make it notable in Hebrew letters: it is an early Hebrew witness to logarithms, then barely a decade old in any language, and it engages post-Copernican astronomy directly rather than at second hand — Delmedigo had studied at Padua, where he attended Galileo.
Sefer Elim is the clearest evidence that the scientific revolution was being read and argued about in Hebrew as it happened, not decades later. That it took the form of a reply to a Karaite scholar matters too: the correspondence crosses a sharp communal boundary, and Delmedigo answers the questions on their merits. The book is a record of a mind formed by both a rabbinic education and an Italian university, refusing to keep them in separate compartments.
The translated volume reproduces the Odessa 1864 edition; the work was first printed at Amsterdam in 1629. That printing carries its own apparatus — the approbations, a statement by the publishers, and a toledot or life-history of the author, styled there as the rabbi, gaon, investigator, kabbalist and divine philosopher, which conveys how the nineteenth century wished to present him.