A Name Riddle in a Samaritan Hebrew Poem

Abstract The article presents a section of an 18th-century Hybrid Samaritan Hebrew poem from the Day of Atonement liturgy that contains a name riddle. The text is translated, explained, and then compared to Jewish Hebrew name riddle poems from medieval Andalusia. Since the genre of Hebrew name riddle poems is generally thought to be unique to Andalusian poetry, the discovery of the Samaritan specimen is surprising. It is argued that the Jewish and Samaritan Hebrew name riddle poems developed independently from the Arabic muʿammā genre. The discovery testifies to the importance of the corpus of Samaritan Hebrew texts for the study of Hebrew literature.