Vol. 31:3

The prophet takes his station on the matzor to await an answer, and nobody is sure what that is — distress, siege, siege-mound, bulwark, citadel. Reading it as a synonym of mishmarti founders on the grammar. Argues the word is a corruption and reconstructs the original, which bears on whether Habakkuk had a fixed place of prophetic retreat, and whether he was a cultic prophet at all.

The Bible's first war, fought by the founding father, and it fails several tests the philosophers would later set. Abram was unmoved by twelve years of Sodom's oppression and acted only for a kinsman; there is no sign of diplomacy first, and the account is silent on casualties on either side. Argues the abstract criteria can never suffice — a leader must also weigh intentions and losses, and so can never fight without anguish.

The longest account of any judge, and the only one whose second name is cited outside the book. Sorts biblical names into theophoric, symbolic, and the small class given an etymology — where the derivation is usually midrash, phonetic at best. Havvah should have been Hayyah; would Pharaoh's daughter have known Hebrew, or given her adopted son a Hebrew name? Then Gideon, from the root that means to cut down, and the asherah he cut.

Stein commends Ephros on Nineveh and Sodom — Jonah seeking justice for the guilty as Abraham sought mercy for the innocent. Eder reads Abraham's 'before Thee' as a wish that Ishmael walk in God's ways rather than a plea for protection, and disputes dating Arab persecution of Jews before the late Middle Ages. Chinitz argues the seduction law concerns a minor, and that on several points talmudic law is gentler to the offender than secular law.

The lexicons barely treat it, and where they do it is an obstacle to speech, or mourning, or the muteness of idols. Argues silence is a live force with its own range. If life is relationship sustained by speech, then dumah is death's most intimate aspect — no more dialogue, the dead no longer remembering God. Then the causative forms, in which enemies are reduced to silence, and the whole question of God's own.

Creation establishes the rhythm of light and dark before anything can live in it — and we now know that rhythm is what tells the body when to secrete and when to sleep. Reads sleep in the Bible as gift and as vulnerability (Samson shorn, Saul spared while a deep sleep from the Lord lay on his men), and maps the Hebrew terms — tenumah, yashen, tardemah — onto the stages sleep research later distinguished.

Isaac bound with the knife above him became the emblem of Jewish catastrophe — in Ephraim of Bonn, in Kafka's Joseph K. spread on a rock, in Wiesel's Isaac arriving at Majdanek. In none of them does the angel appear; some midrashim have Isaac slaughtered and revived. Asks why the parallel story of the mother and her seven sons never took hold, and answers that the midrashists intuited what the rescue meant.

Egypt waters its crops by the farmer's own foot; the Land drinks rain from heaven, and only while its people keep faith. Rashbam draws the conclusion — better than all lands for those who observe, worse for those who don't. Reads that climate as an automatic feedback mechanism, on the model of Halevi's heart: the frailest organ, and therefore the one warned earliest, purging trouble before it takes root.

Two puzzles. Why place the lineage here, interrupting the mission to Pharaoh and forcing a recap, when Exodus 2 was the natural home for it? And why spend two verses on Reuben and Simeon first, merely repeating Genesis 46? Weighs the pshat answer, that they are the route to Levi, against Sforno and a midrash — then finds the placement explained by what Moses stops saying about the Israelites between 6:12 and 6:30.

If the point were to condemn murder, a plain prohibition would have done; instead we get both brothers' occupations in detail. And the surprise is that civilisation — the city, the harp and pipe, the forging of bronze and iron — descends from the first murderer. Reads the occupations as decisive: the shepherd accepts the earth as given, the farmer must impose himself on a reluctant soil, and the character follows.

Custom and tradition dominate modern Judaism and are almost absent from the Tanakh: neither word appears in the Torah, and each appears once elsewhere — minhag describing how Jehu drives, masoret in the bond of the covenant. The Torah's six legal terms are all formal and legislated. And Abraham's virtue is precisely that he abandoned his fathers' ways rather than inheriting them.

Tanna d'be Eliyahu divides the world's six millennia into chaos, Torah and Messiah — the messianic age opening in the fifth. Ussher dates Creation to 4004 BCE and the nativity to 4 BCE, placing it exactly four thousand years after. He read Hebrew, taught divinity at Trinity, and the midrash is quoted twice in the Babylonian Talmud. No proof is claimed; the alternative is a remarkable coincidence.