טוביה בן אליעזר

Rabbeinu Tuvia ben Eliezer was a chacham and paytan of the Byzantine lands in the generation of the First Crusade, the spiritual leader of the kehillot of Macedonia, and the author of the Midrash Lekach Tov on the Torah and the five Megillot — the work known also as Pesikta Zutarta. He lived in Kastoria and served the kehillah of Salonika (Greece); his rebbe was a Rav Shimshon whom he quotes in his commentary on Kohelet. The dates woven into his work show that he wrote it in 4857/1097 and returned to revise it a decade later, and he mourns in it the destruction of the kehillot of Ashkenaz in the gezeirot of 4856/1096.

He named the work Lekach Tov after his own name — and opened every parsha with a pasuk containing the word “tov” — and so the early rishonim cite it; the name Pesikta Zutarta arose generations later through a printers’ error, and caused it to be confused with the Pesikta Rabbati. The work itself is a marriage of peshat and aggadah: the grammatical sense of the pesukim beside the midrashim of Chazal, which he gathers, orders, shortens and renders from Aramaic into clear and beautiful Hebrew — with halachot woven in where the parshiyot deal in mitzvot, drawn in part from the She’iltot of Rav Achai Gaon.

A master of Hebrew grammar who held that not a letter in the Torah is extra or lacking, he built interpretations on the kri and ketiv, and set himself firmly against the Karaites throughout the work. He wrote as well a commentary on the piyutim of Rabbeinu Elazar HaKalir. The Lekach Tov spread through all the lands of Israel’s dispersion, and is cited by rishonim from Rashi’s school onward — a bridge between the world of the midrashim and the commentary of the generations that followed.