and lines of rhymed prose make it his longest work. *Ḥanukka-nāma (The Book of Hanukah), his other long narrative, is an account of the Maccabees’ successful military campaign against the Seleucid dynasty in the second century B.C.E. The extant manuscript copies are incomplete; in the introduction, however, Ben Samuel expresses his desire to continue in the tradition, begun by *Shāhīn in the fo...