Sefer ha-Bal‘ei (Treatise on Astrology); and Treatise on Astronomy, Moses ben Joseph ha-Levi, [Bukhara: ca. 1799]

Sefer ha-Bal‘ei is a book in ten chapters, each of which treats a different weather- or astronomy-related phenomenon and provides horoscopes based on whether or not they occur on a given Hebrew date. Examples of phenomena discussed include shooting stars, thunder, rainbows, rain, and the “swallowing” (hence the name of the work) of the sun and the moon. The tract was particularly popular in the Near East (especially Persia) and was first printed as part of Rabbi Abraham Hamuy’s (1838-1886) Sefer Devek me-Ah (Livorno, 1874). The present lot includes the first six and a half chapters (ff. 27r-30v).

This work is then followed by a treatise on astronomy, astrology, and the Hebrew calendar by Moses ben Joseph ha-Levi (see the poem on ff. 80v-81r). According to Shlomo Zucker of the Hebrew University, this author is known to us from only one other source, a calendrical work copied in the nineteenth century (MS Jerusalem, Krupp 2135). However, a search of the catalogue of the National Library of Israel turns up Sefer Mesharet Mosheh, which seems to be the same work, in two copies:

The present tract seems to have been written in the late sixteenth or early seventeenth century, based on the dates the author uses as illustrative examples. Represented here (ff. 41r-123r) is the text starting in the middle of chapter four and continuing through chapter twenty-three, with some intervening material lost. The last few leaves (ff. 123r-126v), written in Judeo-Persian, discuss the “world’s seven continents.”