Vol. 33:1
Three objections to Moshe Reiss's case for Rebekah over Isaac. The va-yomer in Genesis 18:15 leaves it open whether God or Abraham says 'you did laugh', and either way contradicting is not accusing of lying — that label belongs to the narrator. Rebekah never calls Esau 'Jacob's brother' to anyone but Jacob. And the blessing of posterity she receives at 24:60 comes from her family, not from the Lord.
Having established in Part I that the three-day journey was a stratagem, asks what it was for. The people believed, then turned on Moses within a few verses — because leaving was not, logistically, thinkable: two million people fed and watered in the desert, then a walled Canaan to take. Their prayer had been for a lighter workload, not independence, which is also why Pharaoh never suspected they might go.
The root d-v-r appears over a thousand times in the piel and forty-one in the kal, almost always as a participle. Following Nyberg, that kal participle is denominative — it names a habitual act, the nature or profession of the speaker — which is why dovér attaches to those who speak truth, or lies, or peace as a matter of character, and preferentially to God, whose speaking is constant even when specific.
Rava held there is no substantial difference between the two words for interest, and Cassuto follows him — the repetition is there to close loopholes, and where all interest is forbidden there is nothing to rank. But the Mishnah's distinction, neshekh prepaid and tarbit accrued, survives translation into modern finance, and on that reading the biting interest really does cost the borrower more.
A modern sacrifice is instrumental — give something up, get a result — which makes the Temple's sprinklings of blood hard to read. Finds the analogy in the queues at the Red Cross after September 11, where the need to give plainly outran the capacity to receive. Blood given is at once symbol and effect: an acknowledgement that one's own survival was accidental, and a real repair.
Soloveitchik's two Adams — Natura, chief of the animal world but marked by the Image of God, and Humanus, commanded outward into intellectual endeavour — meet a paradox in Genesis 2:17. Man is bidden to quest for knowledge and denied the one tree that holds it, so he must learn to live by a principle of limitation. Hence the expulsion; hence Milton's Adam departing greatly instructed, and Browning's reach exceeding its grasp.
Hallazeh and hallaz occur ten times in the Bible, always in direct speech, where the literary dialect would use zeh and zot. Argues they carry a further charge: contempt, or the vulgarising of the ordinary — Rebekah on first sighting Isaac, Joseph's brothers as he approaches. Sophocles' Athena, the accusation before Pilate, and Latin iste show the same use of the demonstrative elsewhere.
Why is the deceived Man of God struck down while the lying Old Prophet is spared and even rewarded? Proposes that I Kings 13 is modelled on Balaam: in both, a true prophet obeys, then violates his charge, is rebuked through a mouth that had never prophesied before, and is finally brought to submission. Their near-identical refusals of a wicked king's gold — and where the two stories diverge — carry the answer.