Vol. 31:2
In biblical rosters of ten, the seventh and tenth entries carry special weight — Enoch and Noah, Boaz and David, the Amorites and Jebusites. Having shown the device also governs narrative in the ten plagues, where hail gets the longest divine monologue, fourteen mentions and Pharaoh's first confession, applies the same reading to the rabbinic list of Abraham's ten trials.
Kiddushin reads veshinnantam as repeat, and improves on it by three-peating — a whole pedagogy of rote, with nothing said of debate or question. But the root is sh-n-n, to sharpen, not sh-n-h, as Rashi noted a thousand years ago and as the unpointed consonants already show. Elsewhere sh-n-n gives the sharp arrows of an army, the tooth, the tongue as keen as a sword. That range is what Deuteronomy 6 is asking for.
The northern ten tribes vanished into Assyria; the two southern tribes went into a stronger and more sophisticated Babylon and came back. Over 40,000 answered Cyrus, where the Philistines, exiled by the same conqueror, simply ceased to exist. Looks at the 278 years from 722 to Ezra-Nehemiah for what made the difference — Ezekiel among the first deportees, and exiles who already had elders to consult.
Delete everything Jewish from the Christian Scriptures and they become unintelligible; delete Christianity and Judaism continues unaffected. Neither Paul nor the evangelists knew Jesus, and by the time a biography mattered it was too late to gather one — so the Tanakh, probably in Septuagint form, supplied it. Over 600 verses trace back. The fulfilments prove not prophecy but eisegesis, and good copying.
Rashi, Ibn Ezra, Maimonides and Kimhi made the marriage allegory or dream, finding it repugnant that God should command it — though one may ask whether an act becomes less objectionable for being commanded in a vision. Weighs four readings, and prefers the one in which Gomer is not a harlot but a woman of harlotry, implicated in the nation's guilt rather than her own, her children's names spelling the message.
Every commentator repeats that Persian law could not be revoked, and no Persian source says so — nor any Greek one, though the Greeks mocked Persian ways freely. Argues the two supporting verses say something else: lo ya'avor means not transgressed, and le'hashiv concerns recall. Herodotus put three months on a message crossing the empire, and Haman's had been out seventy days. The damage could not be recalled, which is why Esther asked for arms instead.
Jotham's parable turns on what the atad is, and identifying it as the thorny Lycium europaeum makes nonsense of the offer — that bush is low and casts no shade at all. Proposes the Christ Thorn, a stately evergreen up to ten metres whose shade is so deep that nothing grows beneath it. Which, Zanger suggests, is exactly Jotham's point, and can be seen outside the gate at Tel es-Sultan in Jericho.
Josiah Derby, rabbi emeritus of the Rego Park Jewish Center and of Congregation Beth Shalom, Coconut Creek, died on 13 Tevet 5763, a week short of eighty-nine. Born in Berditchev, a Harvard mathematician before the Seminary ordained him, an army chaplain, and the seventh-generation descendant of Levi Yitzchak of Berditchev. He founded the first Conservative day school in the country, and wrote more than thirty articles for this journal.
Three angelic encounters, read as one long interior struggle. Returning after twenty years to a brother with reason to kill him, Jacob remembers the ladder — angels rising out of sight, angels coming down — and cannot tell whether they are abandoning him or guarding him. At Mahanaim he calls what he sees God's camp, a word with a military sense, and fears the old curse has come to be carried out.
David's dirge for Saul and Jonathan opens with an order that the Judites be taught it — a public text. The chiastic inclusio of verses 19 and 25 closes the composed kina, leaving the last two verses outside it, and inside it the imagery is all war and giborim rather than the lyre David actually played for Saul. Which sets up the tension Alter and Gros Louis find in the David of I Samuel 16-17, between the public man and the private one.
The practice looks like one of the observances instituted to remember the destroyed Temple — but Daniel is already doing it in Babylon, and the fifty years between destruction and rebuilding left little time for such customs to form. Traces it instead to Solomon's dedication oration: thirty-one verses about the Temple as a house of prayer that never once mention sacrifice.
The shva under the bet makes it in a beginning, not in the beginning — a qamatz would be needed for the definite reading, and the Masoretic vocalisation everyone reads in synagogue has the shva. Rashi solved it syntactically by making the first verse a relative clause, but that requires revocalising the second word too. Proposes keeping the received vowels and the literal sense, and follows where it leads.