Ibn Daud Abraham, also called Rabad (c.1110– 80), Spanish Jewish historian and astronomer, a philosophic precursor of Maimonides. Born in Córdova and schooled by a beloved uncle, Baruch Albalia, in Jewish and Greco-Arabic learning, he fled the Almohad invasion of 1146, settling in Christian Toledo, where he was martyred. His Sefer ha-Qabbalah (1161; translated by Gerson Cohen as The Book of Tradition, 1967) finds providential continuity in Jewish intellectual history. His Emunah Ramah (1161; translated by Norbert Samuelson as The Exalted Faith, 1986) was written in Arabic but preserved in Hebrew. It anchors Jewish natural theology and ethics in Avicennan metaphysics, mitigated by a voluntaristic account of emanation and by the assertion that God created matter. Ibn Daud saves human freedom by holding that God knows undetermined events as possible. He defends prophecy as an outpouring of the Active Intellect – or of God – on those whose natures and circumstances permit their inspiration. Prophetic miracles are perfectly natural alterations of the familiar characters of things. See also AVI- CENN. L.E.G.