Book of the Seventy Isolated Biblical Words

The “Isolated Biblical Words” mentioned in the title of the Book of the Seventy Isolated Biblical Words (Kitāb al-sab‘īn lafẓa al-mufrada) are what are usually termed hapax legomena, words that appear only once in an entire canon—here, in the Hebrew Bible. Se‘adya discusses each of these words to show that to understand them, one needs the interpretations found in the rabbinic tradition. A polemical argument against the Karaites, who rejected rabbinic tradition and claimed to rely solely on the biblical text, underlies the book as a whole but is made explicit in the introduction, from which this extract is taken.