Vol. 32:4

We live with Moses nine months of the year and have no idea what he looked like — except for the one thing Ki Tissa tells us, that his face shone, karan, which the Vulgate misread as horns and Michelangelo carved. A child's thank-you letter mishearing the Eternal Light as an internal light turns out to have found the point: the spark of the divine image, the light of conscience, in everyone.

Reuben tears his begadav; five verses later Jacob tears his simlotav. Tests three explanations — status, degree of grief, style — against usage. Simlah is worn by leaders and paupers alike, and though it is torn only three times and always over death, beged is torn over death some thirty times elsewhere. Onkelos renders both as levush, which leaves style, and pshuto ke'targumo.

God's answer at the bush seems not to address what Moses actually asked. Following Rashbam — who prefaces his comment by saying nobody before him understood the verse at all — the charge is two distinct tasks, confronting Pharaoh and bringing the people out; Moses questions both, and God answers each in turn. That reading makes the Exodus narrative a single woven unit rather than a sequence.

A century earlier the northern deportees had vanished into Assyrian culture within a generation, priests pressed into the conquerors' service and a whole army unit made of exiles. Argues that Ezekiel diagnosed why, and set himself the task of preventing a repeat — and that being priest as well as prophet is exactly what equipped him for it, whatever the Talmud's three hundred barrels of oil or Torrey's claim that he never existed.

Layers of later symbolism — hostile Edom, the Idumeans, Herod, Rome, Christianity — have made an objective reading of Esau nearly impossible, and prophet and sage seem to license the worst of it. Sets that aside to ask what Jacob, deciding whether to announce his return after twenty years and a death threat, actually understood about his brother's character.

Two priests who were also prophets, living through the same catastrophe and answering it differently: Jeremiah blames ethical failure, Ezekiel ritual. Jeremiah is the only prophet whose prayers are private cries rather than public office — told not to intercede, denied a family, left with nothing but God, an impossible companion — and the only one, says the Talmud, to have written his own story.

Why should the Kiddush force the Masoretic text so that its first four words spell the Tetragrammaton? Two answers: the biblical portion names God only as Elohim, so the addition balances judgement with mercy, as the midrash has God do at Creation; and Genesis 2:2 seems to say God finished on the seventh day, a difficulty the Samaritan Pentateuch solves by emendation and the Kiddush perhaps by juxtaposition.

A critical review of Thomas Thompson, for whom there was never a United Monarchy, no pre-exilic prophets, and only a Hellenistic Bible. Grants the methodological point that archaeology should not be read through the Bible, then presses two habits: impugning the integrity of earlier scholars whose reconstructions later evidence undid, and presenting self-evident statements as discoveries.

On the conventional reading the Akedah is about blind obedience — doing the plainly wrong thing because God said so. But that sits badly with everything else Genesis tells us about Abraham, who gives Lot first choice of land, refuses his war booty, and argues for Sodom; and with Maimonides, who has him reason his way to monotheism and use the same logic on everyone else. Proposes a second meaning embedded in the text, each serving a different purpose.

Exodus grounds the Sabbath in Creation — imitatio Dei, man ceasing as the Creator ceased. Deuteronomy drops that entirely and grounds it in the Exodus, making it a social protection for slaves and workers. Asks whether the two are separate or developmental, and what the Israelites can have understood by the command when it was already in force at the manna, before Sinai and with no reason given.