At the beginning of Cuzari II, 62, the ḥaver (Hallevi’s spokesman) says that the Shekhina fucntions for Israel like spirit functions for the human body, “infusing it with divine vitality (ḥayā ilāhiyya)”. Baneth-Ben-Shammai list no variants for the phrase ḥayā ilāhiyya. The Hebrew translations use employ slightly different language in order to render the phrase “divine life”—all except for Professor Michel Schwarz, who has here instead “divine property” or “divine arrangement” (תכונה אלוהית). Since there is no note explaining why Professor Schwarz chose to deviate from the universally accepted text, this must be a misreading; clearly, he saw היאה instead of חיאה. Indeed, I have never seen the phrase hay’a ilāhiyya. It is an intriguing possibility, which I cannot explore here; nevertheless, I can’t imagine that Professor Schwarz would have emended the text without providing an explanatory footnote.

The phrase ḥayā ilāhiyya, in the sense of “divine vitality”, may have been used earlier in the Cuzari. The question hinges on a difference between Ibn Tibbon’s translation and the unique Arabic manuscript. Surprisingly, it is not marked by Baneth-Ben-Shammai, and the only one to notice it as far as I have seen is Even-Shmuel. It occurs in the long disquisition on animal sacrifices in Cuzari II, 26, right before the citation from Joshua 3:10. The extant Arabic manuscript displays: wa-hākadhā intaẓamat al-milla al-ḥayya al- ilāhiyya, which the modern Hebrew translators render, with varying phrasing, “and in this manner the living, divine, community is arrayed”. Ibn Tibbon, however, has here: וכן נסדר החיות האלהי. Grammatically, the phrasing is problematic; but clearly, he does not account for milla, and so in his version, ḥayā ilāhiyya is the subject of the sentence. Hallevi must be talking about the divine vitality. Which of the two readings makes better sense? In my opinion, that depends on the meaning we ascribe to the verb intaẓama, which is no simple matter. I have already made a blog post and video on Hallevi’s uses of “order”, It would make sense for him to talk about the Jewish people having a higher degree of order. On the other hand, the verse speaks of “living God”. Hmmm…

There is a tradition of viewing life itself as divine; living being partake of the divine just by living. Let’s add that to the brew and carry on with this inquiry.