Abstrakt
The titles of many pre-modern Hebrew books are notoriously elusive. Only rarely do the titles refer to the actual content of the book.
More often they have intertextual or even symbolic meaning, working with numerical values of Hebrew letters, hinting at or hiding author's names, or consisting of fragments of Biblical verses. R.
Judah Leva ben Betzalel, called the Maharal (ca. 1525-1609), authored more than ten works and published most of them during his lifetime. Although their titles attracted some attention from scholars, a faulty reading and understanding of one of them still prevails.
Between 1995 and 2013, no less than four scholars addressed the question of the reading and meaning of the Maharal's work ספר באר הגולה; the title traditionally read as Beʾer ha-golah, and understood as the Well of the Exile. This article places the debate about the title of ספר באר הגולה into the context of the Maharal's other books, resumes the arguments formulated in the existing scholarship, and suggests yet another solution to the problem based on the detailed analysis of the Maharal's own introduction to his book and on the typography of the editio princeps (Prague 1598).
We will propose reading the title as Beʾer ha-goleh (and will use this variant throughout this study) and suggest that its meaning oscillates based on multiple connotations.