רד"ק

Rav David Kimchi (4920/1160–4995/1235), known for all generations as the Radak and in English sources as David Kimhi, was among the greatest of the mefarshei hamikra and among the foremost grammarians of lashon hakodesh. His father, Rav Yosef Kimchi, the Rikam, a parshan and grammarian of Spanish birth, fled the persecutions of the Almohads to Provence and settled in Narbonne, where the Radak, the youngest of the family, was apparently born. His father was niftar in his childhood, and he was raised and taught by his older brother, Rav Moshe Kimchi, himself an important grammarian and parshan of mikra; he supported himself by teaching Gemara to the young.

His Michlol stands in two parts: a sefer of dikduk, and a lexicon of the language of mikra arranged by three-letter shorashim, which came to be printed on its own as the Sefer HaShorashim. Into it he sank the Torah of the early grammarians, R’ Yehudah Chayuj and R’ Yonah ibn Janach, together with the derech of his brother Rav Moshe and hachraot and chiddushim of his own; its clear order and its definitions built on etymology and the comparison of languages carried it far, and it was drawn upon again generations later. He also wrote Et Sofer, a short manual of the rules for writing sifrei Torah, masorah, nikud, and taamei hamikra, composed because those rules had grown weak in the hands of the sofrim of his day. He occupied himself with philosophy and the sciences under the influence of the Ibn Ezra and the Rambam, and when the storm broke out over the Rambam’s writings he stood among the Rambam’s defenders and wrote to rabbanim to gather support.

His peirushim cover Bereishit, Nevi’im Rishonim and Acharonim, Tehillim, and Divrei HaYamim, and his peirush on Nevi’im entered the Mikraot Gedolot in all its editions. His greatness as a parshan is in the completeness of the work: peshat and dikduk, nikud and masorah, questions of chronology and geography, and wide use of Targum Yonatan with its variant girsaot — and, like Rashi, he admits openly where he has not found a satisfying reason for a passage. In Bereishit he leans toward the philosophical, seeking the moral gain of the Torah’s stories, and he wrote al derech hanistar on Gan Eden, on Kayin and Hevel, and on the Maaseh Merkavah of the first perek of Yechezkel. Like his father he argued much against the Christian reading of mikra, above all in Tehillim and Yeshayahu, and for this his peirushim to those sefarim were censored in very many places, printed whole again only in recent generations. The later Metzudot of Rav David Altschuler drew greatly from his work, and Radak Street in the Rechavia neighborhood of Yerushalayim is called by his name.