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Anan ben David

Anan Ben David (ענן בן דוד; ca. 715 – ca. 795) is widely considered to be a major founder of Ḳaraite Judaism. His followers were called Ananites and, like modern Ḳaraites, did not consider the lineage of rabbinic Jewish teachings to be authoritative.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anan_ben_David
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Schedule for a semiannual Torah reading cycle as recorded by ‘Anan ben David (ca. 8th c. CE)

Contributed by: Isaac Gantwerk Mayer (translation), Anan ben David

All Jews around the world today follow some variant of the annual cycle of Torah readings, developed in the Babylonian diaspora in the talmudic era. In this cycle, the entire Torah is read once a year. (Some Reform communities recite a selection from each parasha, while many Conservative communities follow an ersatz triennial system where a third of each parashah is read every week, but the parashiyot still follow the annual cycle.) The old Erets Yisrael rite had a triennial, or technically semiseptennial, cycle, going through the entire Torah once every three and a half years. But there is a third cycle that has otherwise been completely forgotten about: the semiannual cycle. This cycle was developed by ‘Anan ben David, the legendary founder (or if you ask the Ḳaraites, reviver) of the Ḳaraite movement, in his (only fragmentarily preserved) Sefer ha-Mitsvot. In it, the entire Torah is read twice a year, concluding on the intermediate sabbath of both Pesaḥ and Sukkot before starting anew the next week. This idea did not catch on, even among the Ḳaraites, who to this day use an adaptation of the rabbinic annual cycle instead. But it has largely been preserved. Here it is restored and reconstructed for those whose main complaint with the Torah reading is it isn’t long enough.



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