Vol. 31:4
We call God our Father and do not scruple to name our own fathers; we are commanded to love Him, and no other love forbids speaking the beloved's name. Traces the prohibition to a biblical idea of the extended self, in which name, image, shadow and even clothing are integral parts of a person — which is why Eleazar became priest by being dressed in Aaron's garments, and why the nazirite burns his hair.
Thirty-five years of reading the burning bush as a manifestation of the God who is a consuming fire — until the author saw the motto over the door at JTS, and then the Holocaust memorials inside. Fire in the prophets also means affliction: the furnace of Isaiah 48, the iron furnace of Egypt. On that reading the sign is not arbitrary attention-getting but integral, and the bush is Israel.
The Bible says its heroines are fair and then declines to describe them: Rebekah is very fair to look upon, and what follows is her watering the camels. Abigail's intellect is named before her face. The law of the captive woman builds in a month during which her looks will fade, so the decision cannot rest on them. And Joseph, David, Absalom show what mere attraction to beauty can cost.
Genesis 1 answers why, not how — the Torah is no textbook of natural science. Read symbolically the six days run in order of what each thing means for man: light and darkness give time, the expanse gives space, then land, food, seasons, and finally a creature able to carry a soul. And the woman was not made from a rib: the Hebrew is his side, which makes the separation an image of man's own duality.
The Torah calls only three passages a shir, and Ha'azinu is the one Moses recites alone. Israel had heard these chastisements before, most recently in Deuteronomy 28 — so why in verse? Abravanel answers that prose is forgotten however often repeated, while what is sung is carried by its melody. Reads the prosody line by line: the syllable counts, where the accents fall, and how each verset builds to its climax.
Against reading a canon as ideological coercion or a clash of wills, Alter offers a dynamic trans-historical textual community. His key move is a double canonicity: Esther, Job, Song of Songs and Ecclesiastes earned their place partly as literature, their stylistic authority outweighing doctrinal doubts. Then Kafka, Bialik and Joyce, each reusing Scripture while appearing to reject it.
A report on the 2003 Chidon HaTanakh. Sixty teenagers from 27 countries; Joshua Laker of the Mesivta of New Jersey took the Diaspora round, a year after his sister placed second in it. Moran Gomri of Beersheba won the televised final and the title Kallat HaTanakh. Israel, the report notes with pride, marks its independence day not with a military parade but with a Bible contest.
The Shema commands a thread of blue on the fringes, and no tallit worn today has one — not even among the ultra-orthodox. The answer the author got from Eretz Hemdah is that the dye came from a sea creature unidentified for eleven centuries, and any substitute would be a forgery. Sets that against a Bible full of blue, whole lengths of it in the Tabernacle, and against the injunction not to subtract.
A 25-metre calendar laid out at Neot Kedumim, with a rotating inner circle of lunar months against a fixed solar outer one, so a visitor can turn the wheel and watch the eleven-day gap open until a month must be added. The synchronising matters: Passover falls both in Nissan, set by the moon, and in aviv, set by the sun — the God of history and the God of the harvest being one.
Psalms refers to God's shem about a hundred times, and the word is doing different work each time — essential nature, power, reputation. Why say that God's name is the Lord, or that it endures forever? Because a name here is a sign of an attribute. Which is also why we can trust in a holy name, and why majestic, awesome and sublime attach to it: shem stands as synecdoche for the whole.
Rav Yehudah says most people are guilty of some sort of thievery, and the sages had in mind something subtler than burglary. The Hafetz Haim reprinted smudged pages lest a buyer receive damaged goods. Fail to return a greeting and you have stolen goodwill; fail to gladden a bridegroom and you have robbed him of joy due him; stand blocking the synagogue door and you are robbing the congregation of air.
Word-pairs entered scholarship as a footnote to parallelism in poetry, but they run through the prose too — heaven and earth, light and darkness open Genesis. Treats sow/reap and plow/reap as semantically one, each naming an antecedent and its consequence in the agricultural year, and sets out criteria that work outside poetry before listing and reading every occurrence.
Abraham's call, the Exodus, Sinai, the conquest, David's capital, Solomon's Temple — Israel has too many candidate foundings, and the dictionary definition only engages a nation once it already has the attributes. Argues the Torah names the moment itself, and that it is a startling one: the blessings and curses proclaimed across Gerizim and Ebal, with the whole people answering Amen.