Isaac Satanow (1732–1804) was born in Satanov, Podolia, and settled in Berlin in 1771 or 1772, where he served as the director of Society for the Education of the Youth. Among the most prolific of the early Haskalah writers, he did not restrict himself to any particular literary field, but wrote in most of those genres used by the later Haskalah writers. Satanow demonstrated a wealth of knowledge of the Hebrew language, ranking as a model stylist throughout the Haskalah period. He ascribed several of his works to earlier writers, and consequently used fictitious names for the authors of the recommendations for his own books and of their forewords. He wrote a number of books of liturgy, Tefillah mi-Kol ha-Shanah al Pi Kelalei ha-Dikduk (1785), Haggadah shel Pesah (1785); and Selihot (1785); as well as Mishlei Asaf and Zemirot Asaf (4 vols., 1789–1802), collections of proverbs in imitation of the Book of Proverbs. (Satanow adopted the pseudonym Asaf from the acrostic for Itzik Satanow.) The work, attributed to the biblical Asaph son of Berechiah, is written in the style of Proverbs and Psalms. He may have been the first Hebrew writer who sought to break out of the strict framework of biblical style, although he himself was very adept in the biblical style called melizah. Hence he demanded that new words be coined; in Iggeret Beit Tefillah he complains that the vocabulary of biblical Hebrew had not preserved its great lexical range.

שם הספר ומקום הדפוס בדיו אדומה. דף [2,א-ב]: "שירת דודים", שיר. חתום: מאיר נ' מסעוד די ביטון מנכדי לחם משנה. שם בדוי. השיר הוא של יצחק סאטאנוב. "שפת אמת" הוא חלק ג של ספר הגדרים. הראשון הוא שפתי רננות, השני שפה אחת והרביעי דברים אחדים. נדפס יחד עם "דברים אחדים". הסכמות: ר' צבי הירש [ב"ר אריה ליב לווין], ברלין, כז אלול תקמ"ג, והסכמה עם עשר חתימות של רבנים מפולניה ומגרמניה.