Vol. 54:3
In I Samuel 10 and II Samuel 6, music marks decisive moments of royal legitimation by mediating the LORD's presence in public space. Saul's encounter with prophetic music temporarily authenticates his divine selection through charismatic empowerment; David's orchestration of music before the ark enacts a more durable model of sacral kingship grounded in the localisation of divine presence. Michal's rebuke, read against Saul's final prophetic humiliation, reveals a competing Saulide vision of kingship invested in visibility, decorum, and distance.
Psalm 68 is widely considered the most difficult of the 150 psalms to interpret — some scholars have labeled it a catalogue of thirty separate song fragments. But the psalm itself insists on its musical identity, opening with an instruction to the choirmaster and describing a musical procession of singers, musicians, and maidens playing timbrels. This study proposes a new approach, Choral Criticism: hearing the psalm's supposedly incoherent parts as different voices and instruments in a single ensemble, whose music once bridged the gaps that later scribal divisions — verse endings, chapter numbers, white space — created in the text.
The tragic events of Jeremiah 40-44 — Gedaliah's assassination and the flight to Egypt — unfolded because each protagonist interpreted events through the lens of a distinct biblical text: Gedaliah through proto-Jeremiah, Ishmael ben Nethaniah through the book of Samuel, Johanan ben Kareah through the book of Joshua. Jeremiah, despite orations evoking Samuel and Moses, could not dissuade them. But once the people were in Egypt, they were ultimately saved by Jeremiah's final, original prophetic act of writing — composing the book of Kings, which contextualized the hurban and set the record straight such that recovery would be possible.
Annunciation narratives — pronouncements about an existing or future pregnancy — recur across Genesis, Judges, the Gospel of Luke, and Surah 19 of the Qur'an. This article identifies ten recurring tropes in these accounts, from divine visitation and the naming of the woman to the mention of food and water and the prediction of the child's special future, showing how later traditions appropriate and recalibrate inherited motifs to articulate their own religious claims.
Psalm 8 praises the Lord for having created so glorious a creature as man — yet its central verse poses a question the Bible itself never answers: What is mankind that You are mindful of them? The psalmist's plaint reflects us back to the unexplained declaration that man is made in God's image and likeness, and its rhetorical question is read here as a challenge: to reflect philosophically on man's seemingly paradoxical nature, part animal and part divine, and to integrate that duality at the highest level.
Across the Ancient Near East, war was never understood as a merely human enterprise. From the Hebrew Bible to Moabite, Assyrian, Babylonian, and Hittite royal inscriptions, kings consistently portrayed conflict as divinely mandated, divinely supervised, and divinely judged: deities commanded campaigns, marched with armies, hurled storms upon enemies, and rendered verdicts in treaty disputes. This brief survey examines the roles the gods played in war — and how victory confirmed a god's favor while defeat exposed guilt, oath-breaking, or sin.
A report on the 63rd International Bible Contest for Jewish Youth, held in Jerusalem on Israel's 78th Independence Day. Sixteen contestants from seven countries participated in the finals; this year's winner was Hodaya Cohen from Israel, with Akiva Schrier and Yehoshua Applebaum of the United States taking second and third place. The Jewish Bible Association is proud to be an affiliate sponsor.
Brief notices of three new books: Andrei Orlov's Supernal Serpent, an exhaustive study of the Leviathan from ancient Mesopotamian myth through Tanakh, Pseudepigrapha, Talmud and Zohar; Jennie Grillo's Daniel After Babylon, on the Septuagint additions to Daniel and their role in the history of interpretation; and the Koren Tanakh of the Land of Israel: Deuteronomy, completing that series' commentary on the Torah.