Vol. 32:1
Can Mosaic origin be affirmed rationally rather than by blind faith, when the codes contradict each other — the tithe going to the sanctuary, the Levites and the farmer in three different books? Sets the aggadah of Moses in Akiba's classroom, understanding nothing until told the source is Sinai, against Halivni's minimalist and maximalist positions, and against the Chronicler, who already attributed his own era's practice to Moses.
Akiba's famous image, preserved because Rashi quoted it: do not teach them by rote and spare yourself the reasons, but set it out ready to be taken in. Reconstructs how he got there. Set before is used where something is presented for consideration; set for them where law is imposed. These conditional judgments would naturally go to judges — but Akiba reads them as going to the people.
From mid-Exodus through Leviticus into Numbers 10, the text runs out of chronological order and repeats itself. Argues the repetitions are expansions: Leviticus tells us Aaron raised his hands to bless, and only Numbers supplies the words. Sorts the cases into pure expansion, narrative expansion — Jethro's departure, taken up again eight chapters later — and expansion of the Lord's injunctions, then reconstructs the sequence.
A Cairo weekly reports a law dean preparing to sue the Jews of the world for the gold taken at the Exodus, repayable with interest over a thousand years. Gratifying, in a way, to see a legal expert in Egypt place such reliance on the Bible — but if the record is admitted as historically accurate, it invites a counter-claim for 430 years of slave labour and a decree to drown the male infants.
Anat is never named in the Bible, but a pillar at Beth Shean calls her Queen of Heaven, and fifth-century papyri from Elephantine show Jewish mercenaries worshipping her alongside Yahoo. The Septuagint and Vulgate read Jeremiah's m-l-kh-t as malkat, queen; the Tiberian masoretes vocalised it melekhet, work, which makes little sense — and conveniently conceals that Jews once worshipped a goddess.
Eder finds Ezekiel 37 rebuilding the re-gathering of Israel out of the vocabulary of Adam's formation — the breath, the coming to life, the giving of rest. Kelman argues Havvah and hay are philologically one, and asks that a darshanut piece say plainly whether it is offering pshat or a drash of a drash. Reiss answers an earlier letter on Ishmael: the protection Abraham sought was from Sarah.
It is civilians who doubt the military plausibility of Joshua; soldiers almost without exception grant it. Sets out the five ways a fortified city could be taken in that period — over the wall, through it, under it, by siege, by ruse — and what the Egyptian reliefs show about each, noting that the Egyptians took cities without heavy siege engines and that Thutmose III still needed seven months at Megiddo.
Minhag comes from a root meaning to lead, and the Talmud makes it as binding as Torah — at times more so, since custom overrules law. Sorts customs into three kinds: fences around the law, spurs to the indifferent, and embellishments of love for the commandments. Notes what communities absorbed from their neighbours — clerical collars, the shtreimel of the Polish nobility, bridesmaids.
Reads Ruth as a political text about the origins of a dynasty, with Naomi as its central actor. Famine in the Bible sends people abroad to find what is missing at home and return changed: Abram came back rich, Jacob's family came back a nation, Naomi came back with the great-grandmother of David. Argues that Ruth's Moabite ancestry is not a liability to be explained away but essential to what follows.
The Hebrew month opens not at the full moon but at the dark of it — the Israelites blessed the moon precisely when its power was least evident and other cultures were not worshipping it. Traces how a day on which work is permitted became one on which women abstain, and how the talmudic reward for refusing to give jewellery to the Golden Calf licensed a celebration women were very likely already keeping.
The Psalms rank him with Moses, yet he tries to install his worthless sons, anoints a king who fails, and nearly anoints the wrong brother after that. Judge, prophet and priest at once — the only such figure, and not even a Levite. Follows the wordplay Hannah leaves unresolved: she asked, sha'ul, four times over, and named the child Samuel; the name she did not use went to the king he would come to destroy.
A Torah scroll carries no punctuation, but its spacing carries meaning: the open paragraph running to the end of the line, the closed one of nine letters, four blank lines between books. Works through what the sages counted and what they must have meant by a unit — 5,845 verses, each with exactly one etnachta — and notes that the chapter numbers everyone now uses came from a thirteenth-century English bishop.
The context is favourable and the epithet is not. Rashi takes it for weakness — their strength was in their mouths — and Radak, something of a naturalist, adds that worms chew through everything in the soil and bring down the cedars of Lebanon: slow, but they get it all. A cut earthworm regenerates, which fits Davidowitz's everdying people, and sets up Kazantzakis on the caterpillar and the flying fish.
Alone among the prophets, Habakkuk opens by complaining — and every complaint carries the seed of claiming to know better. Everything turns on one word: is the lamma of 1:3 inquisitive, asking what he is meant to learn from the sight, or rhetorical, meaning don't bother, I know already? The verse that follows, in which he shows he grasps the consequences too, settles it.