Vol. 29:4

To get from Egypt to Mesopotamia you must pass through the Land of Israel, and to pass Mount Carmel most traffic took the narrow Aruna pass — at whose mouth stood Megiddo. Whoever holds the town holds the pass, the road, and the commerce of the world; there is money in a toll booth on the main road, and there is also getting run over. History's first recorded battle was fought here in 1468 BCE, Josiah died here, and John placed the last battle here too. The battle raging at Megiddo now is over chronology.

Enlil floods the earth because human noise annoys the gods, and Utnapishtim is a weapon Ea uses against him; Noah is saved because he is righteous in a perverse generation. The Song at the Sea shares the vocabulary of Enuma Elish and the Baal cycle — the four winds, the mountain of thine inheritance, the house built for the victor — and uses it for something else entirely: not a war among gods but the keeping of a promise made to Abraham.

The pre-Exilic prophets are dated, if at all, by a later hand adding the names of kings; the post-Exilic ones give the regnal year, the month and the day — thirteen such dates in Ezekiel alone. The difference is not idiosyncrasy but Babylon, whose wise men held that events in the heavens governed events on earth, so that every day carried its own value and had to be recorded. The exiles brought the month names home along with a new script.

Three lessons out of one verse. The Bible stayed the living law of the Jews precisely because it was never merely a book of laws: Jews built no science of law as Rome did, they legalised every moment of a life. Business is never merely business, and no fast on Yom Kippur expiates a false weight. And above the letter stands lifnim meshurat hadin — Ramban's warning that a man can keep the whole law and still be a scoundrel, which is what Sodom was.

Elisha has none of Nathan's indignation or Elijah's fury, yet nine of the twenty-five chapters of II Kings are his, against sixteen for thirty kings. Read carefully the loose episodes form a pattern: one man's lifelong campaign to eliminate Baal-worship in Israel. Traces his growth from Elijah's servant to head of the Bnei Neviim, his standing with royalty and in Aram, and his toppling of the House of Omri.

Luther complained that Isaiah poured out whatever came into his head, in any order, and it drove him half-mad. Philology and archaeology have since settled the broad question of authorship — first Isaiah through chapter 36, a narrative bridge from Kings, Deutero-Isaiah in Babylonia two centuries later. What they have not cleared away are the selective readings imposed by three constituencies who claim the book: Reform Jews, political liberals and Christians.

Amos 6:1 has a solid parallelism in its first half that every commentator then abandons in its second, because nekuvei will not pair with ubau lahem. Reads both as actions — entering and coming — one for Zion, one for Samaria, so the woe falls on two kingdoms confident in their two sanctuaries. Continues the cruxes of Parts I-III.

Why would sober sages tell us to drink until we cannot tell Mordecai from Haman — losing the whole point of the day? Because that is precisely the condition of everyone in the book. A king who throws a 180-day banquet to mark the third year of his reign, who never asks who his wife's people are, nor which nation Haman wants destroyed; a Vashti who misjudged her husband; and Jews at the orgy without a qualm, sure their neighbours would defend them.

Sixty-five students from thirty-one countries, the final held in Jerusalem on Independence Day with two hours of live television. Ariel Sharon gave the group most of an hour, telling them Eretz Yisrael is holy to many peoples but the Promised Land to no other. First place went to Shai Hason of Moshav Elyakim, who has triumphed over congenital cerebral palsy, ahead of Eliav Danziger of Canada.

Three patriarchal narratives foreshadow later legislation. Ham seeing his father's nakedness reads against the Holiness Code, where the same phrase plainly denotes intercourse — and Ham is the ancestor of both Egypt and Canaan, the two nations whose practices Leviticus 18 forbids. Then Lot's separation from Abraham, first for its levirate implications, then for the ban on admitting Moabites and Ammonites.

Three laws the Talmud declares never happened and never will: the razed house, the destroyed city, the stoned son. Yet Rabbi Jonathan says he sat on the city's ruin and on the son's grave, and infected bricks were reportedly found in the Galilee. The usual answer — the rabbis humanised a harsh Mosaic law — sits badly with a tradition that never did the same for the red heifer or kashrut. Proposes another reading.