“Ḥiwi” (Ḥəyyawi) of Balkh

This chapter is about an elusive arch-heretic from Judaism, “Ḥiwi” from Balkh in northern Afghanistan, who was active in Iraq in Caliphal times. It is even unclear what his actual name was. I claim that the spelling “Ḥywy” stands for Ḥəyyāwī, an Iraqi Jewish endearing form of the Aramaic name Ḥiyyā. It became a clearly Jewish form of the name. In writing, for centuries, one would formally write Ḥiyyā, and that endearing form, with an Arabic diminutive suffix with a medieval feel to it, was actually much older. How did I find the onomastic situation clear, when scholars both premodern and modern did not manage to? My own father and one of my maternal uncles were called Ḥəyyāwī. I was even able to reproduce and discuss snippets of who they were named after on official documents from both Iraq and Israel, which was sometimes in a distorted way. The chapter, however, is not confined to onomastics, even though it makes a substantial contribution to that discipline about a vexed question. The chapter also tries to clarify what “Ḥiwi”’s doctrines were, and the affinities of the format in which he presented them. Is it true that he was “the Jewish Marcion”? He presented arguments against the Hebrew Bible, in both substance and format rather akin to the substance and format of Carpocratian and Marcionite arguments against Scripture, Marcion’s Antitheses, Apelles’ Syllogisms, and the so-called isagogical or philological genre of the “questions and answers” (erotapokriseis).