Vol. 30:3
Twenty-three verses hold the first family, the first murder and the first death. Wiesel finds the theme is responsibility, with neither brother wholly guilty nor wholly innocent. Repunctuate Cain's answer and it stops being a lie and becomes a defence — I didn't know I was supposed to be my brother's keeper — which is worse, because now he knows. And against the mark of Cain as inherited criminality, Adam and Eve simply begin again.
A martyr, by the dictionary, dies rather than renounce his religion — the ten rabbis under Hadrian, the communities of Cologne, Blois and York who chose death over baptism, the uncounted of the Shoah. In four thousand years only Samson chose to kill his enemies as he died, and he is not offered for emulation. Written because propaganda during the intifada calls suicide bombers martyrs. They are not; they are murderers.
God dealt with humanity universally through Adam, Noah and Babel, and each attempt failed; then came a particular choice, one family through which all families would be blessed. A reply to Pinchas Kahn on the universal mission, pressing the other side: the danger of letting particularism be eclipsed by the cosmic design — a tendency Vogel traces from Hermann Cohen and Buber to contemporary Israeli intellectuals.
The narrative never once calls Elisha a prophet — only a man of God, a title David also carries — except in his own mouth. He needs a musician before the hand of the Lord will come, responds to one king and not another out of respect, and his most dramatic predictions yield partial victories. Asks whether the Bible is quietly mocking the ecstatic prophecy Moses himself imprudently wished on everyone.
Against Christianity, Judaism insists Moses was only a man and we pray to God directly. Read dispassionately, the sources are less certain: the people believed in the Lord and in Moses His servant; forty days without bread or water; I stood between the Lord and you. Set against that, the Torah is at pains to give him an ordinary conception and an ordinary death.
Retribution, protest, and vicarious purpose. The first rests on Abraham at Sodom and on Sinai, and admits repentance as a way out, most nobly in Jonah — but shows cracks when Jeremiah asks why the way of the wicked prospers. Job breaks with it outright, moving the question from the nation to one man. Isaiah's suffering servant makes the suffering itself part of a plan for Israel and for everyone.
Zion began as the whole of David's city on the south-eastern hill, grew with Jerusalem, then stretched to mean all Judah and even the people themselves. Then it shrank to the Temple precinct — and by the first century had moved across town, because Josephus called the south-western hill the stronghold of David. Which is where the schoolchildren point today, above a Crusader tomb built over what is very likely Jerusalem's oldest synagogue.
Abraham argues furiously over Sodom and goes silent at the Akedah. What bridges them is God's own musing — that he will teach his household justice and judgment, a criterion never named before. Reads the intervening material, apparently miscellaneous, as a lesson plan: Abraham being brought to terms with ethical complexity, so that a God of justice can still be taught in a world that looks absurd.
The bodily resurrection of Daniel 12 cannot have arrived from nowhere in the second century BCE. Tests five verbs — hayah, qum, hekitz, shuv, tzitz — across earlier texts, and finds the motif where qum stands parallel to hayah: the Songs of Moses and Hannah, which put death before life; Elijah and Elisha; Hosea, Isaiah, Ezekiel. Then asks whether the reference is the nation restored or the individual revived.
A suspended nun turns Moshe into Menashe, and the rabbis read it as a scribe sparing the prophet an idolatrous grandson. But the chronology defeats it: Gershom was born in Midian, so his son would have been over 150 when the young Levite served Micah. Argues the identification with that Levite rests on nothing but proximity in the chapter, and proposes a different Jonathan.