Vol. 30:2

Sorts divination from sorcery, magic, enchantment and the rest, then groups the biblical injunctions: outright prohibition, insistence that only God discloses, anxiety about false dreamers, contempt for the peoples who practise it, and the punishments — Samaria for its enchantments, Manasseh carried to Babylon. Then the methods actually attested, from the Urim and Thummim to the king of Babylon shaking his arrows, and Joseph, one of only two Israelites in the Bible to read dreams.

If human action is externally controlled, no law can be just and God owns the bad deeds as well as the good — which is why Koheleth's catalogue of times and seasons has had to be moderated or explained away. Modern commentators divide over how deterministic the book is, and few notice the argument is old: the Targumist and Ibn Ezra read it deterministically, and later Jewish commentators set about countering them.

Anthropology can explain the Hagar arrangement as ordinary Near Eastern practice, but the Bible is not a record of ethnology. Takes Zornberg's reading of Jacob and Rachel as the model — a wife for whom a child is the primary passion, a husband who cannot see why his love is not enough — and applies it to Abraham, who complies with the surrogacy without enthusiasm, merely listening to the voice of his wife.

Thirty-six times the Torah asks that the stranger be loved, for two reasons: you know the feeling, and you know what was done to you. Ramban grounds it in imitatio Dei — God loves the stranger, so go and do likewise. Then the harder case: unload a friend's ass or load an enemy's? The enemy first, says the Talmud, to crush the evil inclination — or, in the Tosefta's better version, to crush the enemy's heart and change it.

Everyone reads Gideon's answer as a compliment that soothed a slighted tribe. Read closely it is an evasion that never addresses the charge, and an insult besides: gleanings are what is left for the poor because it is inferior, so nobody could seriously rank them above the vintage. Set against Jephthah, who answered the same accusation directly and got a war for it, the dissembling looks deliberate.

Genesis Rabbah and most commentators read the serpent in the path as Samson. Four objections: it skips Moses and Aaron entirely; the other blessings assign present standing, not distant prophecy; the sons listening could not have understood it; and a man of prodigious strength is poorly figured as a limbless snake, with no mounted Philistines anywhere in his story. Follows Abraham ben-HaRambam toward Dan as guerrilla fighter, in an age the Hyksos had just given the horse.

God draws off the spirit that is on Moses and puts it on seventy elders — but the text never says how Moses came to have it. Numbers 11 turns the mood of the book: the people crave meat and are promised a month of it, and Moses joins the complaining, asking to be killed rather than lead them. The elders' brief ecstasy reads less as a gift than as a matching punishment, a surfeit of spirit.

Three women of the name: two at the centre of their stories, one a bare mention — or is that third a deliberate echo, meant to be caught by hearers who knew the oral history? Notes what most translations soften: the second word used of Judah's roadside encounter carries the root for holy, making Tamar's disguise that of a cult prostitute, so that lying with her implies not lust but pagan worship.

Laws addressed to Israel alone, and classed as hukim — not amenable to reason — have somehow become the object of hundreds of websites, most run by Christian fundamentalists wrestling with an Old Testament the New has not superseded. Sets Halevi, for whom the inexplicable is the point, against Philo's allegories of fish that resist the current, against Maimonides, who calls the appeal to irrationality a spiritual sickness.

Who names a child Sickness, or Decimation? Chronicles may preserve the real names, which would mean the author changed them to make them speak. Works through the book's doubled meanings: Orpah from the nape, who turned her back; Ruth whose letters plus the seven Noahide laws make 613; and a family that leaves the house of bread during a famine for the open fields of Moab, where in biblical writing an empty field precedes tragedy.