Vol. 29:1
Every version turns verse 1 into a clause hanging on verse 2, because none can find it a subject. But Scripture repeatedly puts God in the hiding — darkness as His screen, the secret pavilion, the hidden face in five psalms. Make Elyon the subject of dwells and Shaddai of abides, and verse 1 stands alone: the Most High dwells in secret places. Verse 2 is then the petitioner calling Him out of them.
A sheikh skims Genesis, collects the familiar anthropomorphisms — God resting, Adam hiding, Jacob wrestling — and denounces Jewish heresy. The tirade is a pretext, and its target is the claim to pray on the Temple Mount. Notes what changed: Arab leaders once kept their case political and never disputed the Jewish tie to the land, which would have been awkward when so many village names are biblical Hebrew barely disguised.
The brother who swore to kill him embraces him and weeps; the angel — a kindred spirit, an associate in God's service — leaves him lamed. One Midrash makes the assailant one of the protecting angels of the ladder; another makes him Esau's guardian, collecting for the lentil pottage. Or read the two as two kinds of strife: the domestic quarrel over inheritance, which can be repaired, and the harder one with God.
Genesis 30 reports, apparently verbatim, a wage negotiation — and one recognisable anywhere from the Euphrates to the Sahara. Name your wages and I shall pay is not a concession, it is an opening, exactly as Ephron's I give you the field was to Abraham, who knew to answer with money. So Jacob's Pay me nothing is not modesty but the standard move, and what follows is the flock divided by fleece.
Costumes and noisemakers notwithstanding, a story about attempted genocide has darker aspects. Read as a manual of diaspora politics, the arguments on both sides are shallow: Haman offers the king a bribe, and the Jews are worth saving because the queen is beautiful and Mordecai foiled a plot. And the Megillah never refutes Haman's charge that their laws are different — it ends by instituting another distinctively Jewish law.
A herdsman and dresser of sycamores who saw doom in prosperity, and a master of innuendo whose short book has generated a library of unresolved cruxes. Opens with the name: the Midrash makes Amos a stammerer, burdened of tongue; Weiss derives it from Amasiah, God carried; the root can mean carried or carrying, and the Greek confusion of Amos with Amoz is what made Isaiah his son.
Reads the closing verses of the five books of Psalms, and then of the five Halleluyah psalms, for how far the writers' gaze extends. Book One blesses the God of Israel; Book Two adds the whole earth; Book Five reaches everything that has breath. The Halleluyah psalms swing just as wide, from 147, where only Israel is given His word, to 149, where the nations appear only to be bound with chains.
Five hundred years before Herodotus, and with nothing in Babylon or Egypt remotely comparable. Reads the craft: meaning carried in sound, where Peninah's taunt hisses with sibilants and Elkanah answers in soft l's, and Goliath's armour clashes in sh while David's staff and five smooth stones run on breath. Then the leitmotifs — the Ark, the roof, hair — threading plot into plot.
Why, near the end of the yearly cycle and almost through Deuteronomy, does the intermediate Sabbath of Sukkot send the congregation back to the golden calf? Because the episode holds two incompatible images at once — a people very nearly destroyed, and a people given a second ascent of the mountain. And what Moses brought down the second time was not a lighter Torah or a new one, but exactly the same words.
Who killed the firstborn of Egypt? The text says God, and the Haggadah insists on it — not by an angel, not by a messenger. But the narrative resists: a people convinced they will all die unless Israel leaves is chasing Israel down within days, their terror evaporated. Argues it was the darkness, not the death, that broke Egypt, and that the Egyptians slaughtered their own firstborn as pagans did when a sun god appeared to be dying.
How could Pharaoh expect Hebrew midwives to kill Hebrew children — and why does he said appear twice in two verses? Read asher as that rather than as a relative pronoun and the first audience is not a dangling introduction but its own event: he gave them Egyptian names. Only after they had time to weigh what a place among the elite was worth did he call them back and name the price. Which is how assimilation has always worked.
Three passages set the scene: the oracle that the older shall serve the younger, Esau spurning the birthright for a meal, and the Hittite wives who embittered his parents. On that footing there is no deception. Isaac hears Jacob's voice, hears him say the Lord your God, smells the field rather than the hunt — and blesses him anyway, unwilling to wound a favourite son by saying outright why. The one who withheld the truth was Esau.
Neither divine name is ever taken whole. Sets out the patterns — El at the head or the tail, the Tetragrammaton reduced to Yeho-, Yo- or -yahu, and once to the single letter added to Avram and Sarai — then asks what the parents meant. Thanks for a son given (the Nathan names), for a son granted by favour (the Hanan names), or a hope for his future: may God raise him, fortify him, strengthen him.