Jewish learning in Muslim lands in the Middle Ages was transformed by its absorption of Muslim and Greco-Arabic learning, which included grammar and philology, poetics, hermeneutics, and philosophy, all of which contributed to the forging of substantially new methods of Jewish Bible exegesis. Earlier Jewish Bible interpretation was dominated by the creative midrashic forms of “rewriting” the Bible, which had been consolidated in the Talmud and various halakhic and aggadic midrashic compilations. But from the ninth century onward, Karaite scholars in the Muslim East rejected rabbinic authority and spearheaded a new philologically oriented exegetical method.