Vol. 29:2
Aaron stands by while Moses strikes the rock, and is barred from the land for it. Explanations run from silence to cowardice to divine caprice to a delayed punishment for the golden calf, and none has convinced anyone. Argues the grammar settles it: God's instruction was addressed to both brothers, and three later verses use the plural you. Moses did what he should not have; Aaron failed to do what he should — a sin of omission beside a sin of commission.
God appears to Abraham at Mamre and says nothing; the next verse has him running after three strangers. Maimonides resolves it by making the whole chapter a prophetic vision, which the realistic texture of the text resists. Proposes instead that the Presence simply stays — through the meal, through Sarah's laughter, through the bargaining over Sodom — and that what Abraham learns from an unbroken Presence during moral work is that God is moral in essence, not merely in what He asks.
Readers of a translation rarely know how many decisions were made for them. Sarah denies laughing and is rebuked — but by whom? The King James keeps the ambiguity with a lower-case he; the JPS capitalises the pronoun mid-sentence and thereby decides for God, silently; the Douay goes further and writes Lord. One capital letter settles a question the Hebrew leaves open, and nothing tells the reader it was ever open.
Each of the four major festivals carries a value modern people prize — freedom, law, introspection, joy — and they are paired so that each checks the other, since freedom without restraint becomes anarchy and law without air stifles. Rosh HaShanah sits in the centre and gives the set divine sanction. And the bond servant who will not go free has his ear bored: the ear that heard we are God's servants and chose a human master instead.
Two flat verses of genealogy open the parsha, and both are redundant: Abraham's paternity stated twice, Aramean twice with Aram set between. Reads the redundancy as a question posed at the outset — which of two cultural inheritances will supply the values of Isaac and Rebekah's children — and the parsha that follows, one deception after another, as the answer working itself out against the charge given before Sodom, to keep the way of the Lord and do justice.
Job longs to behold God and says his kidneys are consumed in his breast — where kidneys are not. The old JPS keeps the organ and softens the location; the new JPS keeps the location and swaps in the heart. Neither is needed: elsewhere the Bible uses kidneys for intention, not for this kind of psychic exhaustion, and the word here is written defectively. Repoint two words and the line reads I am utterly spent within my breast, with the anatomy intact.
Holiness in English suggests ritual and prayer; kedushah in Leviticus covers the whole of life and leans hard on social conduct. Works through the ethical commands of chapter 19 with the commentators: Sifra pairing parents with the Sabbath as the three who made you, Rashi equating the corner of the field with building the Temple, Hirsch insisting that not being a thief leaves you a long way short of kadosh — the command is addressed to a nation.
On Jephthah's vow, against Bodoff and Mehlman. The first words — it shall be the Lord's — say plainly that he did not intend to kill anyone, and the words that follow quote Abraham at the Akedah, which everyone knows did not end in a death. Olah can mean ascent as easily as burnt offering. Jephthah consecrated his daughter, as Hannah did Samuel; unlike Samuel and Samson, she was asked, and she agreed.
Snaith called 2:13 the hardest verse in Amos. The usual renderings need a harvest cart, and ancient Israel did not haul its harvest in carts — it used donkeys and camels, and a metaphor has to land in the hearer's own experience. Repoint the word and it is not a cart but a heifer, over-laden and over-fed, in double jeopardy and too slow to escape. Then the Dmeshek conundrum of 3:12.
A guide for rabbis leading Torah study, working through every parashah and haftarah of the annual cycle by question and answer, with the responses drawn from Rambam, Rashi, Ramban, Nehama Leibowitz, both Talmuds and the Midrash, plus biographical sketches of everyone quoted. Notes especially what it does for Leviticus, a book that can be tedious and here takes on new garb.
Answers Shubert Spero's reply to "Saving the Akedah from the Philosophers." Spero reports the presupposition that the Akedah posed Abraham a moral problem — but the article's point was the reverse: God had promised the covenant would run through Isaac, so Abraham knew no evil would befall him and there was no dilemma to face. Sodom is not the parallel Spero takes it for, since there God stated an outcome, and here He commanded only an act.
Daniel was canonised without opposition yet kept out of the Prophets, on Rashi's account because he never disclosed his visions to the people. So why include the book at all? Prophecy needed for the generations was written down. Its permanent value is in what it records: a religion converting from one taught in a standing Temple to one carried by individuals — which is why Elephantine and Leontopolis built replica temples and Babylon, at Ezekiel's insistence, did not.
No verse in the Torah says how a marriage is made, and only two terse ones say how it is dissolved — yet levirate marriage gets six, with the sandal, the spitting and the name the refuser carries afterwards. Argues the lavishness is corrective: the practice was old, shared with the Canaanites and Hittites, and already operating in Genesis 38, where Judah withholds Shelah and Tamar takes matters into her own hands by the roadside.