Vol. 32:3
Reads the two censuses of Numbers as a guide to the tribal affiliation of living Jews. The absolute counts need not be accurate — only the ratio between tribes need hold — and on that footing, with the northern tribes assimilated, Judah accounts for a clear majority. Then weighs four reasons to think descendants of the lost tribes are among us anyway, starting with the mere 27,000 the Assyrian annals record deporting.
Six chapters, and a figure closer to Greek legend than Hebrew prophecy — an avenging destroyer who, with Elisha, forms the only miracle-working pair besides Moses and Joshua. Notes what the zeal costs: he tells Ahab the rain will stop unless he gives the word, dismisses Obadiah who saved a hundred prophets, and twice insists he alone is left. Mount Carmel deliberately restages Sinai, twelve stones and all.
Emotions are not private events inside one skin; they are aroused and recognised among other people, first of all in a family. Follows Joseph's through three movements of Genesis. His sense of superiority is not spontaneous — he has absorbed part of his father's story of rivalry with Esau, and missed the part about covenant. Jacob's charge names the brothers before the flocks, and Joseph, asked to look for both, repeats the order.
Kings says so itself: for the rest of the acts of any king, look them up elsewhere. Its editors were writing moral evaluation, not annals, and knew it. But conceding the record is incomplete is not conceding it is fraudulent, which is where minimalism goes — the Bible as a late political brief to persuade Persia. Two objections: total scepticism is not available to anyone, and no evidence any Persian official ever read it.
No lectionary reading is taken from Nahum, as if the book had nothing to offer. Because it neither condemns Judah nor calls for repentance, scholars have made its author a nationalist, a cult prophet, or merely a poet. Answers that the demands a prophet places on man reveal what he takes God to be, and that read this way the book carries a theology of eternal validity, in the best prophetic tradition.
Both versions of the Decalogue presume the Sabbath is already known — remember it, observe it as you were commanded. So where was it learned? Traces three stages: the midrash in which Moses persuades Pharaoh that a slave who never rests will die; the manna, where the double portion teaches that the day is a rest for God too; and Sinai, which gives it its reason.
The law of the captive woman, and four questions the commentators seem not to have asked. Is she mourning separation or bereavement? Does isha mean she was married, as Rashi holds, or simply grown? If she still lived with her parents, was the whole population taken? And why are widows — who would be most of the women after a war — never mentioned as eligible at all?
A sequel to "Foretold, Fulfilled, Copied". Early Christianity needed antiquity to establish legitimacy, and its writers had no direct knowledge of Jesus, so the Tanakh became a source book rather than a set of predictions fulfilled. Traces the Judas story on that principle — the thirty pieces of silver, the money flung down in the Temple, the potter's field — back to the Hebrew passages it is built from.
A report on the 2004 Chidon HaTanakh. Fifty-one students from 27 countries contested the Diaspora round at Ariel, where the Defence Minister asked the final question; Yoni Halpern of Canada won it and came second in the main contest, taken by David Tsur-el of Israel. Ariel Sharon, receiving the contestants, observed that the best tour guide to the land is the Tanakh.
Only Isaiah and Ezekiel are inaugurated by a detailed vision of the divine court — and pointedly not Moses, who of all people would have had the clearest view and would surely have reported it if it mattered. That silence, plus the incorporeality of God and of angels, argues the chapters are symbolic. Read ra'ah as intimacy rather than eyesight, and the differences between the visions track the prophets' different eras.
Three readings: the Jewish one, where the disobedience is Adam's alone; the Augustinian, where it stains everyone born; and a third the writer proposes, where no disobedience occurred. Presses the question an inherited act of free will raises, and argues from the text alone that the tree was placed there to be known — the point of the test being to introduce morality through an autonomous choice.