The Moshe Held principle

    As Daniel Bodi put it, “if one can show how insights gained from the study of newly discovered ancient Near Eastern texts have been anticipated by medieval rabbis who did not have access to these buried ancient Semitic documents, then the probability that one’s interpretation is plausible may be increased.”¹ The principle goes back to Moshe Held, a scholar and teacher who was a competent reader of a wide range of texts spanning millennia in numerous languages including Akkadian and Hebrew.