Vol. 31:1

Scholars often say the calf replaced Moses, not God, and functioned like the cherubim — a pedestal for an invisible deity. But then why the gravest sin in Scripture, why Moses' 'whoever is for God, follow me', why three thousand dead? The people asked for elohim in contrast to the man Moses, and hailed it as the god who brought them out. Follows the bull through Egyptian worship to Apis and the solar deity Ra.

Extra-biblical sources give the newborn Noah skin white as snow and eyes transparent to the sun; a Qumran fragment adds red hair. Laban's name means white, and Leah's weak eyes may be the photophobia and nystagmus that go with it. Then the flocks: with Laban having removed every multichrome animal, what Jacob did with the peeled rods was a genetic scheme — Mendel pipped by a shepherd.

Jacob stripped Reuben of the birthright and split it three ways — the double portion to Joseph, kingship to Judah, priesthood to Levi — each tied to a place: Shechem, Shiloh, and the site God would choose. Reads three later crises as fallout from that division: Korah's rebellion, the founding of the monarchy and the siting of the Temple, and Jeroboam's revolt.

Mishpatim commands helping your enemy's fallen ass, and the midrash tells of two mule drivers who hated each other until one turned back, and who ended the day eating together at an inn. Note the order: not a general injunction to love your neighbour in the hope that deeds follow, but the deed prescribed first, with the attitude left to catch up. Scripture understood the psychology well before Freud.

Leeman argues pi shnayim means two-thirds, not double — as it plainly does in Deuteronomy 21:17 and Zechariah 13:8 — so Elisha asked for a fraction of his master's spirit, not twice it. Reiss, against a favourable comparison with Moses, suggests Samuel usurped the priesthood, tried to make the judgeship dynastic, and twice chose a king by his appearance. Stein adds a note on Shebuel son of Gershon.

The Bible is full of maxims about parental love and full of children treated as property. Too much love ruins Jacob's household and costs David his children; meanwhile seduction and rape of a virgin are priced as losses to her father, and the Akedah records no test of Isaac's faith and no reward for it. The key is a society in which the individual is subordinate to the group — and even so, the text begins limiting what parents may do.

The Mechilta assigns four biblical questions to four children and then answers none of them with the answer the Bible supplies. The wicked son's 'to you' is the same phrase the wise son uses, carries no hostility in context, and gets the same reply as the child who cannot ask at all. Argues the point was never to illumine the verses but to secure the standing of the Oral Law beside the Written.

One verse in the theophany where God's anger falls on neharim and yam, and four ways to take them: ordinary rivers and sea, the Jordan and the Red Sea, Ugaritic Prince Sea and Judge River, or the politics of the prophet's own day. Each of the first three leaves questions — why the anger, why the odd plural, why the Jordan before the Sea. Argues for the fourth.

The Bible names a character trait exactly once — that Moses was the humblest of men — and otherwise leaves us to infer. Draws up the job description for each of three roles and shows that Moses, Gideon and Saul each failed it at the moment of appointment: a reluctant emissary who froze at the Sea, a man who demanded two signs and then a third, a king chosen on his looks. So why did God choose them?

Dan sits in the pinched waist of the Rift Valley, on the trade road north, and the digs show it: Mycenaean pottery, Egyptian alabaster, some of the oldest glass ever found. It is the country's northern marker — from Dan to Beersheba, ten times over — and the most authentic tel in Israel, where you walk real streets rather than an excavation. Then the tribe itself: smallest, worst-placed, and the story that follows from that.

The visions resist interpretation and the later chapters look unrelated, which is why many read two prophets in one book. Proposes a single underlying theme, set against the theological moment: Judah came back from Babylon free of idolatry, where the ten tribes and the Elephantine colony did not, and a God no longer tied to one place produced what Bickerman called a paradoxical combination of universal monotheism and particularism.