Vol. 29:3

Continues the argument that the plague of darkness, not the death of the firstborn, forced the Exodus — the Egyptians, believing Ra himself was dying, slaughtered their own firstborn as pagans did, then pursued Israel the moment the light returned. Adds the prophetic evidence: no prophet mentions makat bechorot at all, while many announce a Day of the Lord in which sun, moon and stars go out.

Pronoun ambiguity can be preserved in English; phrase ambiguity cannot, because capitals and commas force a decision. Where a floating middle phrase can attach forward or back, the translator must pick, and the sequence of events changes accordingly. Genesis 34:7 is the test case: Alter, the REB and the NIV have the sons hear then come in from the field; the Douay and the NRSV have them come in, then hear, then rage.

Jacob calls his sons together twice, and only the first call mentions the end of days — a subject the blessings then never touch. The rabbis read the gap: he sought to reveal the end, the Divine Presence withdrew, and he spoke of other things. Behind the midrash lies their own ambivalence about knowing the future at all. If the end is far off we despair; if it seems near, perhaps we stop trying.

Someone or other told Joseph his father was ill — not his family, and there is an implicit reproof in the phrasing. Reads seventeen years of near-total absence from Goshen, which would explain why Jacob does not recognise his own grandchildren and why the brothers still fear for their lives. Then Pharaoh's reluctance to let his viceroy travel: a dispossessed peasantry with reason to want him dead, and a king who needed to hear the words I shall return.

Israel Stein of Bridgeport challenges Sidney Breitbart on Genesis 27: it is Esau who is the man of the field, Jacob who dwells in tents, and the blessing was never the same thing as the birthright. Breitbart answers that a mild man who stayed in camp was not merely eating and sleeping there — someone had to mind the goats — and that Isaac's blessing of dew and grain was plainly meant for a man of the field, not a hunter.

The genealogies prefer vayoled for begot, but two other forms appear — and where they do, one child out of many is singled out. Argues the singling marks two things: the father's aging, and an attempt to rear this son in the father's values, whether or not those values please God. Follows the term from Adam to Terah, with the Midrash's verdict on each of the ten generations, including the two it might have been expected to pass over.

Reads Amos as a live delivery with hecklers in it — the I know of 5:12 answering a dispute, 7:14 answering an interruption. On that reading the unique word boshaskhem in 5:11 is not a misspelt trample but a retort thrown back at the crowd: be quiet. Then the pained farmer of 5:16, whom every commentator has to turn into a professional mourner.

Less is written on the dialogue between a Torah reading and its haftarah than on either alone. Here the Torah approves a man who runs two people through with a spear, and God calls it turning away wrath. The haftarah opens with Israel as a marauding lion — then takes the punishing of idolatry out of human hands entirely, and closes on what the Lord requires: do justly, love mercy, walk humbly. The rabbis who paired them were saying something.

Rachel says nothing that night, and Leah offers no excuse afterwards — yet Rachel must have noticed both her bridegroom and her sister missing. The substitution could not have worked unless all three were in on it. Reconstructs the meeting held while Jacob was in the field: Laban's groundwork, Rachel's objection that seven more years would cost her childbearing, and the handmaids offered to sweeten the deal.

The solar calendar bows to the moon in taking twelve months, and the lunar calendar bows to the sun so that Passover stays in spring — eleven days a year made up by seven leap months in nineteen. Works the arithmetic, notes the anomaly by which a boy born in Adar II reaches Bar Mitzvah before a boy born earlier in Adar, and takes up the blessings of the new moon and of the sun.

Josephus names her, calls her ruler of Egypt and Ethiopia, and elsewhere identifies Saba as the Ethiopian capital later renamed Meroë. Scholarship has settled instead on southern Arabia and simply ignores him, though a wealthy monarch of the biblical stature fits Egypt far better than the Arabian Saba. Sets out the case for each, including the Quran's Bilkis and Genesis 10's two Shebas — one a grandson of Kush, one a Shemite.

Several kings died by violence, but only one was offered a way out of catastrophe and refused it. Traces the descent from Josiah's death at Megiddo through Necho's deposing of Jehoahaz, Jehoiakim's palace-building, and Jehoiachin's surrender, which bought Jerusalem eleven more years. Then Zedekiah — a youngest son never trained to rule, propelled into the nutcracker between Babylon and Egypt, weak and irresolute.