A hybrid witness: between Jewish legal tradition and Judaeo-Arabic scribal culture (ENA 4189.3 and ENA 4189.4)
Introduction
The fragment presented here – two consecutive leaves preserved under shelfmark ENA 4189.3–4 – offers a rare glimpse into a concise Judaeo-Arabic legal pamphlet devoted to the laws of testimony, concerning various subtopics such as oaths, personal status, the proper writing of gittin (divorce deeds), and witnesses. After a long discussion of thirty categories of disqualified witnesses, the author turns to additional topics, including price gouging and fraud (onaʾah) as well as interest (ribbit). Although occasionally associated in oral scholarly discussions with Samuel b. Ḥofni’s Kitāb al-Shahāda, this attribution has never been published or formally established and therefore cannot be regarded as definitive. What can be said with confidence is that the text belongs to the broader family of halakhic monographs on testimonial procedure circulating in the medieval Islamicate world.
Nevertheless, since the manuscript also includes additional halakhic elements not exclusively devoted to testimony, it may have been directed toward judges and may belong, at least in part, to the broader genre of adab al-qāḍī (judicial conduct) literature. Alternatively, it may be understood as a kind of compilation resembling halakhot qeṭanot (minor tractates), or even as a unique mukhtaṣar (concise version) of abbreviated halakhot assembled by the author for personal use. Due to its vocalization and layout, it may also be interpreted as a work dictated, summarized, or copied from oral instruction – a draft, handbook, or notebook written by a disciple for his own use following the teaching of his rabbi. If this last possibility is correct, the disciple in question was clearly not a beginner, but rather a well-trained and highly learned student.1
Its contents address disqualified witnesses, problematic legal formulations, and kinship restrictions, weaving together rabbinic citations with Arabic legal terminology. The fragment's most striking feature is its highly unusual vocalization system – a hybrid mixture of Tiberian and Babylonian Hebrew pointing, Arabic-style diacritics, and inconsistent or layered markings that appear pedagogical or performative in nature. Such extensive vocalization is exceptionally rare in halakhic Judaeo-Arabic manuscripts. Combined with its bilingual glosses and hybrid orthography, the fragment illuminates the diversity and hybridity characteristic of Geonic and post-Geonic halakhic writing, and attests to the existence of independent treatises on testimony and broader halakhic subjects beyond the canonical works.
The manuscript's layered signs might suggest repeated use by multiple readers or scribes over time. This secondary usage implies that the text served as a practical and reusable reference – perhaps consulted in judicial settings or employed as a working handbook for legal deliberation. The cumulative evidence points to a text held in high esteem, functioning within a recurring, performative legal context and reflecting the lived reality of medieval judicial practice. It may also have passed through different hands and geographical settings over time. Even at the present stage of research, there remains room to consider whether the manuscript is of eastern or Yemenite provenance, possibly deriving from a bookbinding context, as well as whether the manuscript was produced by a single hand or by multiple hands, and in which geographical regions it may have circulated and been used.
Manuscript Description
The fragment consists of two paper folios from what appears to be a single fascicle or booklet. The oriental paper, though smooth in texture, has become fragile with age, showing frayed edges, wormholes, and water staining that occasionally obscures the margins. The written space measures approximately 165 × 120 mm within folios of 210 × 160 mm, arranged in single columns of around 28–30 lines. Ruling was executed with a hard point, with pricking marks still visible. The script represents eastern Judaeo-Arabic semi-cursive, executed in brown to black ink with medium module and regular ductus. Characteristic features include elongated yod, sharply descending final mem and nun, and clear separation between dalet and resh. Despite these features, the hand suggests a learned scribe rather than a professional copyist.
No colophon or title survives, but the content and style clearly identify the work as a halakhic legal text. The two folios appear to form a continuous sequence: the text on folio 4b carries over seamlessly to folio 3a, suggesting that the original order was folio 4b followed by 3a. The leaves were therefore likely rebound or separated at some stage, as frequently occurs with Genizah fragments.
Vocalization and Hybrid Features
The fragment's most exceptional characteristic lies in its pervasive yet inconsistent vocalization system. Alongside the full Tiberian Hebrew signs (ḥolam, pataḥ, qamatz, sheva),
it employs Arabic-style tashkīl (fatḥa, kasra, ḍamma, shaddah; and tanwīn ending system – however not in the common Arabic usage)
alongside Judaeo-Arabic diacritical points, glosses (?) in Arabic script, as well as features of the Babylonian supralinear system.
These various conventions are sometimes applied simultaneously to the same word, producing contradictory or otherwise unusual combinations. Such juxtapositions may appear confusing, but they illustrate the scribe’s use of multiple vocalization systems across both Hebrew and Judaeo-Arabic passages, rather than a coherent single system.2 In several instances, what looks like the tanwīn ‘double fatḥa’ sign – though tanwīn by definition is nunation – appears to function differently. It would be more accurate to refer to this mark as ‘double fatḥa’ (indeed, fatḥatayn) and remark that it is identical to the sign for tanwīn fatḥa. Based on the examples highlighted, it seems the vocalizer was thinking of this more as ‘double fatḥa = long a’. However, it’s not always long /a/ – for example, ואמא on ENA 4189.4 verso, 5 lines up from the bottom. It may be a way to mark a glottal stop when א is at the beginning of a syllable (e.g., see אלאמראה on ENA 4189.4 recto, 4 lines up from bottom).
Moreover, a number of the words in Arabic script are also vocalized with Arabic tashkīl signs, suggesting that all systems were deployed across both languages indiscriminately—something that requires further systematic checking. The apparent irregularity of the vocalization does not necessarily stem from a single cause. Some inconsistencies may indeed reflect imperfect understanding of one or more vocalization systems or lapses in the scribe’s control of them. Yet the coexistence of multiple pointing conventions—Tiberian, Babylonian, and Arabic-style—also suggests a more complex history of use and transmission. It is possible that the original scribe employed several systems selectively to emphasize certain phonetic or lexical features, or that later users added auxiliary marks for clarity or correction. Over time, these accumulated layers of vocalization created a text whose markings appear at once hybrid, enigmatic, and at points even self-contradictory. Rather than diminishing its value, this complexity points to the manuscript’s extended life as a dynamic, repeatedly handled document, shaped by multiple acts of engagement across generations.
The variation in the darkness of the ink is normal whenever the scribe’s pen ran dry, which happened many times per page. From the images, there does not appear to be significant variation between the vowels and ductus; they seem to have been written at the same time. The flaking of the ink was caused by later rubbing or damage rather than indicating multiple hands.
Identifying specific examples of where a second hand supplements the text (especially in the vocalization) would clarify this further. Interlinear additions, often in smaller script, appear mainly as corrective insertions where words had been omitted, rather than as separate lexical glosses.
Finally, the text reveals deep penetration of Arabic orthographic and scribal habits into Hebrew writing: certain letters (particularly final nun in the name Reuben) echo the shape of Arabic nūn,
and ligatures such as bet+nun,
attested also in fragments like T-S 8.237v (Tafsir RaSag),
display distinctly Arabic cursive tendencies. The alef-lamed ligature is exceedingly common in Judaeo-Arabic and Hebrew manuscripts and does not represent actual Arabic alif and lām. This shape of the ligature is quite common in Hebrew manuscripts.3 These graphical borrowings imply experimental orthographic practices within a scribal environment attuned to both traditions and opposed to the dominating classical Arabic.
Possible scribal practice
This hybridity blurs the boundaries between Hebrew and Arabic systems of writing and vocalization, pointing to a scribal environment where bilingual habits shaped visual and phonological presentation. The fragment’s interlaced glosses, layered vocalization, and corrections suggest a working or pedagogical text rather than a polished codex – perhaps intended for study or teaching. Writing exercises are by no means uncommon among the Genizah materials. Such training pieces are attested across the entire range of Genizah finds, including European fragments. In the present case, the inconsistent application of vocalization, the absence of any clear rationale for why certain words are pointed while others are not, and the lack of systematicity even within the marked words all suggest that the text may have been used for scribal practice. It is conceivable that the fragment had become worn or otherwise obsolete and was subsequently repurposed for training, with the distinctive markings added at that later stage. Nevertheless, this hypothesis cannot be demonstrated with certainty, and the question must remain currently open.
The text complicates its identity through embedded Hebrew and Aramaic glosses and interlinear insertions that might be integral to the original composition. These glosses – often isolated legal terms – may not represent free code-switching into entire Hebrew or Aramaic sentences, but rather the author’s consistent practice of citing and adapting technical terminology from rabbinic sources into his Judaeo-Arabic discussion. Their integration suggests that the work was conceived in a bilingual intellectual space, where reference to Hebrew/Aramaic authorities was seamlessly folded into a Judaeo-Arabic framework.
Remarks on dating the fragment
Two independent paleographic assessments cautiously point to an early medieval date. A preliminary visual impression by a specialist in Hebrew palaeography suggests a medium Eastern script, possibly of a north-eastern type, tentatively assignable to the 10th–11th centuries (not cited here as a formal opinion). Independently, Nick Posegay proposes a working date of ca. 11th century, most plausibly Egypt or Palestine, while noting the inherently impressionistic nature of paleographic dating. At the same time, material and scribal features – such as the low-quality paper, the use of tashkīl and shadda in Judaeo-Arabic, the mixed Arabic–Hebrew script, and the minimalist alef–lamed ligature—may indicate a somewhat later phase of transmission, possibly extending into the 12th century. Some additional codicological features, including sewing and detachment marks, may also recall phenomena known from Yemenite manuscript culture, though this observation remains preliminary and requires further comparative study. The fragment is therefore best placed within a broad eleventh-century horizon, pending fuller comparative palaeographic analysis.
Analysis of vocalization systems
Most vocalization signs seem broadly consistent with the ductus in terms of ink and damage, making it plausible that most of the consonantal text and vocalization were produced by the same hand and roughly at the same stage of writing. At the same time, the irregularity and layered appearance of some of the markings leave open the possibility of secondary intervention, later pedagogical use, or repeated engagement by readers trained in different traditions. Some of the signs and irregularities may have been perfectly intelligible to the original user while appearing opaque to later readers, perhaps reflecting a mode of writing shaped by oral study, dictation, or practical legal instruction. This shows interesting knowledge of multiple systems, but raises a question about the Babylonian signs – why mark some words with Babylonian signs when Tiberian vocalization is already being used? An ‘eastern’ origin has been cautiously suggested in discussions with specialists, partly in light of parallels with the Afghan documents and the apparent persistence of Babylonian features in Yemenite traditions, though at present this remains speculative and cannot yet be supported conclusively. The use of Arabic tashkīl signs to vocalize Judaeo-Arabic is not a rare phenomenon and does not necessarily indicate higher-than-average engagement with Arabic material than contemporaneous Judaeo-Arabic manuscripts.
A systematic analysis of which languages the vocalizer(s) chose to point would be useful in figuring out their motives. Did the Babylonian vocalizer primarily mark Hebrew words? What kind of Judaeo-Arabic words are vocalized? What systems do they use? For example, מסתשהד on verso line 12 is interesting, combining Tiberian and Arabic tashkīl signs. Some Arabic-script words are also vocalized, and determining what vowel system they use would be informative. Do any Arabic words have a vowel sign that represents a vowel that is not normally recorded in Arabic (i.e., sere, segol, or qamatz)? These could indicate vernacular reflexes of Classical Arabic vowels. Are there any vowels where they ‘shouldn’t’ be? For example, 6 lines up from the bottom of 4189.3r, אנקלאב has a kasra /i/ marked where the consonants suggest it should be a long /a/, probably meant to convey some sort of raised long vowel in the region of /e/.
Vocalization as Cultural Marker
The heavy vocalization of this fragment represents a rarity in halakhic Judaeo-Arabic manuscripts, yet it remains inconsistent and at times faulty. It combines Tiberian Hebrew signs with Arabic vowel marks, and in some cases Babylonian supralinear signs as well. Certain marks are placed in ways that appear arbitrary at first glance, but on closer inspection they may reflect alternative phonological traditions or local conventions rather than mere error. The system seems not to be consistent, yet it evidently functioned for its users. Its application suggests a didactic or performative context – perhaps designed for study or oral recitation – where clarity and reinforcement of sound values were prioritized, even if achieved in unconventional ways.
The blending of Hebrew and Arabic pointing systems could indicate a scribe trained across traditions. Misplaced vowel signs, especially Arabic-style marks written on Hebrew letters, might mirror actual dialectal pronunciation habits. Features such as imāla (raising of /a/ toward /e/) or possible Babylonian Hebrew realizations could underlie these deviations. Thus, ‘wrong’ or ‘misplaced’ vocalization should not be dismissed as error, but understood as evidence of how scribes and readers conceptualized and produced sound, blurring the boundaries between Hebrew and Arabic phonological systems. In effect, the scribes wielded whichever signs best conveyed meaning, creating a system devised for clarity in oral reading contexts.
Textual Analysis—Genre and Structure
ENA 4189.3–4 ostensibly belongs to the genre of juridical compendia treating testimony law (ʿadāla), witness admissibility, and judicial procedure. Even if the overall structure and scope of the halakhic compilation remain unclear, the diversity of legal subjects addressed in the manuscript is readily evident. In Danzig and Lieberman catalogues the only given information is that the fragment concerns testimonial laws in Judaeo-Arabic according to Talmudic sources.4
The text addresses witness disqualification, discusses interest (ribbit), price manipulation (onaʾah), and personal status in marriage, framing these topics within rabbinic (miderabanan) disqualification principles. However, closer examination reveals this is not a straightforward monographic excerpt. Rather, it resembles a collectaneum – loosely connected halakhic dicta, sometimes translated, sometimes resembling digests of longer discussions. The rhythm and texture recall Halakhot genre or unknown halakhot qetsuvot/qetanot traditions – concise formulations designed for practical reference rather than discursive systematization.
Legal Content—Oaths and Testimonial Disqualification in the Fragment
One striking feature of the fragment is its treatment of oaths (shevuʿot) and witnesses within judicial procedure. The text articulates concise, rule-like statements concerning the imposition of oaths when witness reliability is doubtful, reflecting a growing concern with false swearing and judicial integrity. This emphasis resonates with the Geonic shift away from formal biblical oaths toward modified, cautionary practices such as imprecatory oaths or bans.5 It captures, in compressed and mnemonic form, a principle familiar from Geonic responsa: when testimony is uncertain, the court seeks truth through controlled oaths rather than unreliable witnesses.
Beyond its legal content, the fragment’s form reflects the practices of a halakhic culture shaped by both written and oral modes of transmission. Its dense style, vocalization, and enumerative logic – listing categories such as disqualified witnesses – point to a text conceived for systematic study and reuse. Rather than spontaneous record or responsum, it reflects a codified or didactic composition: a concise manual likely used by students or judges. The abundant vocalization reinforces its pedagogical purpose, while the ordered presentation mirrors contemporary Islamic and Geonic efforts to structure law into clear, self-contained units.
Placed within the broader history of Jewish legal writing, the fragment appears to stand between early digests such as Halakhot Pesuqot and the later Geonic monographs of the tenth century, including Kitāb al-Aymān (The Book of Oaths), Kitāb al-Shahādāt wa-l-Wathāʾiq (The Book of Testimonies and Legal Documents), and Kitāb al-Shahāda (The Book of Testimony), among other halakhic monographs devoted to adjudication and judicial procedure. It exemplifies an intermediate stage in the evolution of halakhic codification – still brief and mnemonic, yet already organized and literary. The blend of Hebrew form and Arabic influence, together with signs of multiple scribal or didactic uses, suggests that the manuscript belonged to a textual culture where law was not only transmitted but increasingly written, taught, and reapplied in judicial settings. In this sense, the piece does not merely preserve legal norms about testimonies and oaths; it embodies the transformation of Jewish law itself – from oral discourse into written, structured jurisprudence. The pamphlet begins with folio 4b and continues with 3a. The compiler of the text provides a revealing note on the organization of his discussion:
חסבנא אלפסולים לעדות פוגדנאהם ל' צנפא באלעדד פנקול באכתיאר אן מן הדה אל[ ] שהאדתהם מרדודה מן קבל אג͘סאמהם. והם אשה וחרש וה[?] ושוטה וקטן וסומה ועבד: .... פדלך شرح אלתלתין מן אלפסולין לָעֵדות בְאִכתְּצًאר[.]
We counted those disqualified from testimony and found them to be thirty classes in number. Accordingly, we state by choice that among these are those whose testimony is rejected on account of their person: a woman, a deaf person, a [mute?], an insane person, a minor, a blind person, and a slave. ... Thus, the thirty categories of those disqualified from testimony have been explained in brief.
The fragment suggests that oaths are not merely procedural supplements when testimony is lacking, but rather instruments of last resort safeguarding judicial integrity. This crystallization of themes scattered throughout the Babylonian Talmud and later Geonic rulings appears designed for rapid consultation by a judge or student. Testimonial law (ʿedut/Shahāda) appears alongside these discussions, reinforcing the close link between witness credibility and the imposition of oaths. The fragment outlines criteria for determining witness validity – moral character, communal standing, and religious reliability – before moving seamlessly into cases where oaths might substitute for, or augment, testimony. This juxtaposition underlines a conceptual shift: oaths are not isolated rituals but part of the same continuum of judicial tools used to establish truth. The text does not treat testimony (ʿedut) and oaths (shevuʿot) in isolation; rather, it conveys them as two poles of the same juridical toolkit, an interdependent mechanism for establishing judicial truth. Such formulation may represent an early attempt at systematizing ʿedut and shĕvuʿot, areas typically treated separately in classical halakhic literature.
Furthermore, the same fragment proceeds to discuss other areas of substantive law, including ribbit (interest), onaʾah (fraud or overreaching in commerce), and matters of personal status, such as gittin (divorce) and miʾun (refusal of a minor betrothed). This breadth indicates that the work sought to compile a concise yet comprehensive overview of both procedural and substantive domains within the Geonic legal tradition. The fragment reveals two significant developments. First, halakhic knowledge was being reorganized into practical, bilingual handbooks presenting testimony and oaths as interdependent judicial mechanisms. Second, this reorganization was both literary and linguistic: shifts between Hebrew and Arabic terms mirror conceptual bridging between legal categories. Both testimony and oaths served as tools for securing judicial truth, requiring language flexible enough to move between technical Hebrew/Aramaic and explanatory Arabic. Viewed thus, ENA 4189.3-4 does not merely repeat known Geonic halakha but refracts it through unique scribal culture – hybrid in language, experimental in vocalization, pragmatic in substance – providing rare glimpses into how Jewish courts in the medieval Islamicate East may have conceptualized their judicial toolkit.
Preliminary Historical and Cultural Contextualization
Though discovered in the Cairo Geniza, ENA 4189.3–4 may reflect broader scribal practices. Its combination of Hebrew and Arabic elements, halakhic but non-strictly monographic form, and vocalized, glossed presentation point to textual culture attuned to hybridity, didacticism, and cross-linguistic mobility. The presence of Babylonian vocalization could suggest an eastern context, though this is far from certain. It should be noted that decades of research on the Cairo Genizah provide plenty of evidence for script-mixing in Egypt, Palestine, and North Africa. Cairo also had its own Babylonian synagogue until the 13th century. While an ‘eastern’ origin is possible, the vocalization system and script-mixing alone are not sufficient evidence to make that case definitively.
Codicological clues reinforce a late date. The paper is of modest quality and heavily worn, and the script’s cursive tendencies and minimal ligatures are typical of 12th–13th century style. The use of Arabic tashkīl and shadda on a Judaeo-Arabic text also became more common in later medieval generations. This, however, poses a puzzle: why would a relatively late manuscript still employ Babylonian vowels? One possibility is that it originated in a region where older customs endured – Yemen being one candidate, or an Iraqi or Persian yeshiva where multiple vocalization schemes were taught. Another possibility is that the scribe consciously preserved archaic features, perhaps for teaching. Either way, the anomaly underscores the fragment’s conservative-yet-creative character.
The fragment also resonates with recent scholarship on the ‘Afghan Genizah’ fragments (Invisible East, Document of the Month 425), where similar intersections of Hebrew and Arabic linguistic and graphic practices emerge. ENA 4189.3–4 might thus be situated within this broader phenomenon of Judaeo-Arabic halakhic writing that absorbed, imitated, and reconfigured surrounding Arabic scribal conventions. However, it should be emphasized that the use of Arabic vowels is not itself a sign of unusual ‘Arabization’ – many medieval Judaeo-Arabic scribes naturally wrote Arabic words with Arabic vowels as a normal part of education. What sets this piece apart is the convergence of traditions: Hebrew and Arabic letterforms side by side, Tiberian and Babylonian vowels used in tandem. The fragment’s affinities with the Afghan Genizah materials and other eastern manuscripts remain suggestive but require further investigation.
Conclusion
The manuscript ENA 4189.3–4 bears witness to profoundly hybrid scribal culture, where Jewish legal thought, articulated in Judaeo-Arabic, was transmitted through material forms saturated with Arabic linguistic, paleographic, and orthographic influence. Every line presents riddles of interpretation and historical context, revealing the porous boundaries of Jewish legal culture in the medieval Islamicate world, where textual practices – linguistic, graphic, and juridical – were constantly negotiated and reconfigured.
The fragment represents a ‘hybrid pamphlet’ within the halakhic-literary continuum: neither scholastic monograph nor responsum, neither purely Judaeo-Arabic nor purely Hebrew, neither strictly vocalized nor wholly unmarked. It is a deliberately mixed artifact whose physical and textual form resists neat classification. Precisely for this reason, it serves as a revealing window into the porous boundaries of Jewish legal culture in the medieval Islamicate world. The fragment illuminates how practical halakhic knowledge was reorganized for bilingual audiences, how scribal practices could bridge linguistic and cultural boundaries, and how legal traditions were transmitted through experimental and hybrid material forms. The text thus contributes to our understanding of how Jewish legal traditions adapted to and flourished within the broader cultural matrix of the medieval Islamic world, creating new forms of textual practice that were simultaneously rooted in tradition and responsive to contemporary linguistic and cultural currents.
Footnotes
1 Acknowledgements. I thank Professor Ben Outhwaite, Dr Nadia Vidro, and Dr Nick Posegay for their helpful comments and generous sharing of expertise. Many aspects of the present study nevertheless remain tentative and open to further clarification. Following this preliminary publication, I am currently working together with Dr Uri Melamed toward a full critical edition of the manuscript, in which additional aspects of the text will likely emerge through continued philological and linguistic analysis. I am deeply grateful to Dr Melamed for joining me in this scholarly journey during the final stages of preparing the present study. Readers are kindly asked to regard the present publication as work in progress, since some of the conclusions proposed here may be substantially revised in light of ongoing research on these fragments.
2 For early evidence of Palestinian vocalization and its occasional overlap with other systems, see Nehemya Alloni, Genizah Fragments of the Mishnah, Talmud, and Midrash with Palestinian Vocalization (Jerusalem: Bialik Institute, 1968), p. 3 (in the pamphlet) who lists thirty-three fragments written with exclusively Palestinian vocalization and a single fragment displaying a combination of Palestinian and Babylonian signs – the only such mixed case known to him. Additional examples of hybrid or layered pointing (Palestinian with Tiberian features, sometimes by the same hand!) have been noted by Dr Kim Phillips in his paper presented at the IOSOT conference, Berlin, August 2023, who has emphasized the continuity between the Palestinian and Tiberian systems. Similar coexistence of distinct vocalization traditions is also visible in the Aleppo Codex, where traces of both Tiberian and Babylonian signs appear within the same folia; see Israel Yeivin, The Aleppo Codex of the Bible – A Study of its Vocalization and Accentuation (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1968), pp. 75–76. For later catalogued instances of mixed or overlapping vocalization and further references, see Jacob Sussmann, Thesaurus of Talmudic Manuscripts (Jerusalem: Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, 2012), Vol. III, p. 353 [Supralinear Vocalization (Babylonian, Palestinian) and Mixed Vocalization – 264 entries].
3 See examples at https://www.hebrewpalaeography.com/data/itemimages/1608/?tab=image, https://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-TS-00013-J-00023-00014/1, and https://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-TS-00020-00090/1).
4 Danzig, Neil. A Catalogue of Fragments of Halakhah and Midrash from the Cairo Genizah in the E. N. Adler Collection of the Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. New York & Jerusalem: Jewish Theological Seminary of America & Schocken, 1997, p. 251 no. 7.
5 On this issue see in length: Rosenblatt, Samuel. “The Relations between Jewish and Muslim Laws Concerning Oaths and Vows.” Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research 7 (1935): 229–43; Gideon Libson, ‘The Oath of Destitution “I have no means” (Yamin al a’dm): On the Relationship between Jewish and Islamic Law’, Dine Israel, vol. 35-36 (2021): 283-325 (Hebrew) Neri Y. Ariel, (various entries): Eid; Falschanzeige; Gelübde; Geständnis; Meineid, Lexikon für Kirchen- und Religionsrecht (LKRR), Bd. 1–4, hg. v. Heribert Hallermann, Michael Droege, Thomas Meckel und Heinrich de Wall, Brill: Paderborn – München – Wien – Zürich 2018–2020; idem., ‘Oaths and Vows in Medieval Judaism’, Encyclopedia of the Bible and its Reception (EBR), Ed. Gerold Neckar, DeGruyter | EBR, June 31, 2020, Vol. 21, pp. 1052-1057; idem., ‘Kitāb al-Shahada of Rav Samuel b. Hofni Gaon’, (in cooperation with Dr. Dan Grinberger; in process).
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