Vol. 30:4
Minor prophet is a judgement on length, not weight, and six Hebrew words carry the whole of Amos. A reader hears at once that the verse rings differently, without needing the terms for why. Works through its sound, its parallelism of justice and righteousness, and its surprise — a herdsman who never sought the office and prophesies because a lion has roared and who can but fear.
Between a pioneering father and a resourceful son, Isaac responds rather than initiates: Abraham plans the sister story in advance, Isaac offers it only when asked. Trauma explains much of that — passivity, fear and withdrawal follow being bound by the man meant to protect you. But the midrashim on Sarah's reaction point further back, to something in the relationship with his mother that predates the Akedah.
Abraham was promised an heir of his own seed, and for thirteen years Ishmael was he — the first, with his father, to be circumcised. Then Isaac, and Sarah's demand. Abraham's immediate response to the promise of a second son had been to ask God to protect the first. What Ishmael made of his exile the Bible does not say, but the midrash keeps the relationship alive, and places him at the Akedah.
Israel had copper and almost nothing else, so tin came from Europe by Phoenician ship and iron from Asia Minor. Follows the craft through the biblical record: Job on tunnelling, Solomon's foundries in the Jordan valley, the smith's tongs and hammer and nails, the skin bellows that made the coals hot enough — and the slaves at Timna who worked them, sometimes for a single day.
Whose ass have I taken, asks Moses; whose ox or ass, asks Samuel centuries later. Both foresee or face a demand for a king like all the nations, and both pass over their own sons. Between those matching phrases lies a single political experiment: Moses stripped hereditary power from the first-born and split it between a priestly class and a charismatic leader — which is exactly what Korah, and Reuben's descendants, rebelled against.
Two wicked cities, one destroyed and one spared, with the human party arguing the opposite side each time: Abraham pressing for mercy, Jonah fleeing a mission of it. Sets out the shared vocabulary — the same root for wickedness, the same 'from the greatest to the least', the same unusual verb for overthrow — and tests whether the echoes are coincidence or a deliberate link, ironic in every case.
A report on the 2002 Chidon HaTanakh, held despite the terror campaign, with few Diaspora contestants cancelling. The Diaspora round at Kiryat Shemona was shared by Toronto and Brooklyn; the international final by two Israelis from the Negev, one of them Avihai Sheli of Netivot, deaf and blind, who studies the Bible in braille — following past champions who were blind or had cerebral palsy.
When the Bible calls someone beautiful it is rarely filling in a portrait; it is moving the plot. Rachel is shapely and beautiful, and then Jacob loves her; Joseph gets the same four words and Potiphar's wife follows. Sets that against the Woman of Valour, for whom beauty is hevel and not a qualification, and against Abigail and Esther, whose looks would not have sufficed without the wit.
Gideon refused the crown and the dynasty: the Lord shall rule over you. His illegitimate son killed seventy brothers to take both, and Jotham, the one who escaped, answered from Mount Gerizim with the trees who sought a king. Sets the parable in the long argument over where authority sits — Korah against Moses, and Moses himself wishing that all the Lord's people were prophets.
Kings notes Omri's might without an example of it; the example survives on Mesha's stele, smashed by tribesmen in 1868 and now two-thirds legible. Mesha, a devout servant of Khemosh and a resentful vassal of Israel, records the tribute in lambs' wool, the taking of Nebo by night with seven thousand killed, and the line that Israel perished utterly forever — set beside the Bible's terse notice of the same revolt.
Herbert Rand, born in New York in 1907, practised law for 56 years before turning to the Bible. His 1970 article on figure vases and the Hebrew midwives has been cited in the Illustrated Dictionary of the Bible and in Sarna's Exploring Exodus, and nineteen more have appeared in this journal over twenty years. The tribute lists them all, from Justice in Solomon's Court to The Biblical Concept of Beauty in this issue.
Four chapters after everything was very good, the Creator resolves to blot it out — and not only man, whose free will at least explains something, but beast and creeping thing and the earth itself. In what sense can an animal corrupt its way? Proposes the defect was structural rather than moral, and reads Genesis 6-8 as the Torah's account of the mass extinctions paleontology has since uncovered.