The greatest of the Karaite commentators, Yefet ben 'Eli, worked in Jerusalem in the second half of the tenth century CE, and in it he wrote his masterpiece: a complete and comprehensive translation and interpretation of all the books of the Bible in the Arabic-Jewish language. Yefet's great innovation and achievements as a biblical commentator, especially in the field of literary understanding and the structure of the Bible, had a great influence on the development of the Jewish interpretation of the P'shat in the Middle Ages, both among Karaite commentators, such as Yeshua ben Yehuda and Yaakov ben Reuben, and among rabbinical commentators, such as Raba, Radak and Rabbi Yitzhak ben Shmuel.

This book presents another layer in the enterprise of extracting and translating Yefet's commentaries on the Bible, both in Hebrew and English, which is gaining momentum in Israel and around the world in the last two decades. Following on from the first annotated critical edition in Hebrew, Yefet's Commentary on the Book of Hosea (Poliack and Schlossberg, Ramat Gan: Bar-Ilan University Press, 2006) and Zephaniah (ibid., 2020), the book presents to the Hebrew reader the third volume of the commentaries of Yefet, this time to the book of Samuel 2, with a comprehensive discussion of David's "Story of Inheritance to the Throne", which also includes chapters 1-2 of I Kings. The edition includes an introduction that focuses on the immediate context of Yefet's work, the original text of the translation and interpretation of Yefet in Arabic-Jewish (including individual manuscripts), as well as a modern Hebrew translation, accompanied by rich comparative notes from rabbinical sources and medieval commentators.

The book will be of interest to all those involved in the sciences of Judaism and Islam, in the Arab-Jewish language and culture, and those interested in the interpretation of the Bible for generations, including researchers and students of the Bible and the history of its interpretation, the literature of the first prophets, the history of the people of Israel in the Middle Ages, the history and culture of the Bible, the connections between Arabic and Jewish literature in this era , the Jewish and general thought of the Middle Ages and the Arabic-Jewish language and literature.

Dr. Arye Zoref holds a PhD in Arabic literature from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He participated in the research project "The Character of King David in Jewish Interpretation" in the Department of Biblical Studies of Tel Aviv University. He specializes in Jewish-Arabic of the Middle Ages and interreligious discourse in this era.