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A widely distributed religious legend maintains that Ezra the scribe rewrote the Hebrew Bible sometime during the post-exilic period. The story is interpreted differently among its varying iterations. Some accounts view Ezra’s recovery of the Scriptures as an act of divine wonder while other versions insist that Ezra’s hand distorted the biblical text. Both outlooks are present in medieval Islamic writings. This article considers the polemical approach of three Muslim authors (e.g., al-Ṭabarī, al-Thaʿlabī, and Ibn Ḥazm) and their portraits of Ezra, including his role that led to a purported compromise of Jewish monotheism. The article explores Ibn Ḥazm’s claim that Ezra the scribe corrupted the biblical text. Several sources are examined (e.g., 4 Ezra, Porphyry, Justin Martyr, a Samaritan liturgical imprecation, and diverse rabbinic traditions) as plausible support for the charge that Ezra corrupted the Scriptures. A tale from Avot d’Rabbi Natan that features Ezra’s alleged scribal dots is posited as a reasonable source for the comment. Given Ibn Ḥazm’s interpretive outlook and Ezra’s prominent role in the story, the dots offer a new and sensible explanation.

Taking up phenomenology’s problem of intentionality in the wake of Husserl, Jean-Paul Sartre in the introduction to Being and Nothingness says, «All consciousness, as Husserl has shown, is consciousness of something […] All consciousness is positional in that it transcends itself in order to reach an object, and it exhausts itself in this same positing». Continuing down the page, Sartre notes in turn that intentionality itself is only possible insofar as it is aware of itself. Just as an unconscious intentionality is unthinkable, so too all consciousness is self-consciousness. As he thus explains, «the necessary and sufficient condition for a knowing consciousness to be knowledge of its object, is that it be consciousness of itself as being that knowledge». To pose Husserl’s problem of intentionality, hence, is to pose with it the question of self-consciousness. Sartre asks: “What is this consciousness of consciousness?” Sartre’s question— the question, in short, of what it is to be conscious of oneself—in what follows shall be ours as well.