Vol. 33:2

Glass reflects a beam once; a gem returns it from many facets. An idyllic book with superheroes and no villains turns out to be full of deliberate ambiguity — did Elimelech and his sons die for their sins, or simply die? — and the midrashim, rather than resolving the question, preserve the several readings the text will bear.

Halfway through the Siloam Tunnel the guide says blow out the candles, and the eyes never do adjust — a darkness that stays absolute. Reads the ninth plague by that light. What makes it unique is not the dark but its consequence: people could not see one another. The sages took that morally, and Buber's two peasants make the same point over a drink.

Arguably the most baffling passage in the Hebrew Bible, and almost every verb in it lacks a subject: whom did God seek to kill, at whose feet did Zipporah cast the foreskin, and which son was circumcised? Sets out the difficulties — why circumcision at that moment, why a death sentence without warning for a man raised in isolation from his brethren, why bridegroom and not husband, and why say it twice.

Spero argues that the real difficulty with opening the Kiddush at yom hashishi was never that the words are out of place — they immediately precede vayechulu — but the rule against quoting a fragment of a verse, which the Chatam Sofer answered by reciting the whole of Genesis 1:31. Stein finds that Irving Welfeld's reading of kadosh as distinction plays well against the separations of Genesis 1 and the verb of havdalah.

Commentators have called Nahum a propagandist, a court lackey, a false prophet, or merely a poet — Pfeiffer found nothing religious in his exultation at all. Argues he should be judged by the goal he set himself rather than by the moralising expected of the literary prophets: to breach a wall of hopelessness under an oppressor who held everything from the Tigris to the Nile.

Two sons of long-barren mothers, and two very different kinds of leader. Presses the oddities of the Samson annunciation — a nazirite status imposed from outside, which the Torah's law knows only as a personal vow, and never elsewhere producing strength — and asks why so dramatic a prediction attended a career that instilled fear in the Philistines but built no army and won nothing lasting.

For a document so concerned with law, the Torah is strikingly inconsistent about naming it: din, tzedakah, davar, mishmeret, mitzvah, torah, mishpat, hok, edut, ot. Working through the contexts of each, and through the dispute between Akiba, who found significance in every letter, and Yishmael, who held that the Torah speaks in human language — repetition, metaphor, loose prose and all.

The genealogy of Shem is names without stories until Terah, where a setting appears — most plausibly the Hurrian Ledge across the top of the Fertile Crescent. Sereg, Terah and Nahor answer to towns there (Sarugi, Turahi, Nahor); Nuzu's tablets preserve family law like the patriarchs'; Ebla's onomasticon holds Eber, Ishmael, Esau, Saul and David. Which raises the question of where Terah actually set out from.

Biblical particles carry several senses at once, and akh is a good case. Weighing four renderings of Genesis 44:28 by three tests — climax, reasonableness and usage — argues for 'probably', a sense biblical Hebrew has no dedicated word for and which Radak reaches for when he glosses akh with ulay. Then the cases for 'most of' and 'nevertheless'.

Where the patriarchal families run on rivalry, Moses and his brother and sister act in concert and all three are blessed. Follows the women who made that possible — Miriam arguing her father out of a decree worse than Pharaoh's, the midwives Shifrah and Puah, Jochebed nursing her own child for wages, and the princess who named him and raised him at court.