  While in his discussions of tradition, Saadya uses the word ‘kabar’ which we have already seen to carry with it the sense of reporting (but also, knowing), on this issue of tradition-as-report it is useful also to consider another Arabic root, sami‘a (to hear). While in and of itself, this root simply means ‘to hear,’ it is, we might note, conceptually linked to the notion of ‘report’ in the simple sense that receiving a report most often involves hearing. And so, there is, in the Arabic, a conceptual link between ‘to hear’ and Saadya's notion of tradition (kabar, as a “report”). In fact, the Arabic root ‘to hear’ appears in one of its constructed forms (samâ‘î) with the literal straightforward meaning of ‘traditional’, or ‘derived from tradition’. This link, then, between the notions of hearing and tradition in Saadya's Arabic linguistic and conceptual space is important to helping us properly ‘recover’ the essence of Saadya's notion of “revelation.” Contrary to the Latin-rooted “revelation,” which literally means, “recovering” (from Latin vêô, to cover, and hence “to reveal” literally as “to recover”), the Arabic term which gets translated as “revelation” in Saadya's work is grounded in the Arabic root “to hear.” Consider in particular Saadya's important discussion of a class of Biblical precepts, often translated as “laws of revelation.” Following on a distinction already drawn in rabbinic sources, but providing the first extended discussion of this distinction in a Jewish philosophical text, Saadya draws our attention to the presence of 2 classes of laws in the Hebrew scriptures, most frequently translated as the “laws of reason” and the “laws of revelation.” For the “laws of reason,” Saadya uses the word ‘aqliyyât, from the word ‘aql (lit. the faculty of intellect), and hence, we might say, these laws are ‘the ones that are (or, can  be) known by human intellect,’ or ‘the ones that are (or, at least can in theory be) arrived at through human reason’. As for the “laws of revelation,” Saadya here employs the word sam‘iyyât, from the root sami‘a, ‘to hear’; hence these laws are literally ‘the ones that are heard’. The point, then, is to be aware that the Arabic root of the word translated as “revelation” in the distinction between “laws of reason” and “laws of revelation” is a word that linguistically carries on its sleeve the notion of “being heard” and, as such, carries with it a more immediate correlation with the very concept of tradition (as the [heard] report) than does the Latin-rooted term “revelation.” 