Vol. 33:4

Daniel must recover a dream he was never told and then interpret it, on pain of death — Joseph's feat under harder terms. Asks what the chapter is for: whether it establishes Daniel as a prophet, and whether the night vision qualifies. The Talmud makes him superior to Haggai, Zechariah and Malachi in what he saw and inferior in that he was never sent to Israel; the medievals were less generous still.

Biblical narration is famously brief — Jacob's grief over Joseph takes two verses where Priam's over Hector takes many hexameters — which leaves little to build psychology on and much room for imagination. Reads several father-son pairs where the son is nothing like the father: Abraham and Isaac, and the rebellious sons, Gideon and Abimelech among them.

Tributes from the Jewish Bible Association and the journal's editors to Shimon Bakon, who joined the editorial board of Dor leDor in 1975 and had by then edited the Quarterly for eighteen years. Born in Czechoslovakia, a philosophy doctorate at Masaryk in 1939, three years at Torah Vodaath, the U.S. Army in North Africa and Italy, Jewish education in Bridgeport and Springfield, and aliyah in 1974.

An imagined evening conversation between Hannah and Elkanah after she returns from Shiloh, built to draw out the allusions in her song. She was barren like Sarah, Rebekah, Rachel and Manoah's wife; she vowed as Jacob vowed at Bethel; she dedicated her son as a nazirite like Samson's mother; and singing her exultation she wonders whether she too will be called a prophetess.

A report on the 2005 Chidon HaTanakh. The Diaspora round, contested by 60 students from 34 countries, was held at Kibbutz Dorot near Sderot as a show of support for a town under rocket fire, with the mayor and 200 local pupils present. Haim Kandel of St. Louis won it and placed fourth in the main contest, which went to Shmuel Alpert of Jerusalem.

A book by an unknown Jewish author about a gentile who never existed, asking a question that belongs to everyone — which is why more has been written on it than on any book but Psalms. It disturbs the moral order it inherits, making room for chance and the irrational, and leaves Job to look for another order that will account for his plight.

Where did Bezalel learn goldsmithing? Only Egypt, which suggests skilled Hebrews were apprenticed to craftsmen rather than sent to the brick fields. Then a calculation: assuming an overlay a sixty-fourth of an inch thick and a kapporet thick enough not to buckle, the chest, poles, rings, coronet and cherubim come to some 178 pounds of gold — set against the total contributed in Exodus 38:24.

Judah kept one dynasty for 430 years; Israel ran through nine in 210, seven of them taken by coup. With fearful symmetry, two kings fell in a second regnal year while the army besieged Gibbethon — Nadab in the field, Elah drunk in Tirzah. Zimri, captain of half the chariots, held the throne seven days before word reached the camp and the army made Omri king.

Torah appears thirty-two times in the Pentateuch. Sorts every occurrence into four senses — law in general, a rule for a particular case, the contents of the Torah, and the physical scroll — and finds that all but one of the twenty-one self-referential uses fall in Deuteronomy. Behind the count sits a larger question: is the Torah aware of itself as a book?

Ya'akov and Yosef both begin with yod, and English has a perfectly good /y/ — so why the J? Follows the alphabet from the Northwest Semitic script through Phoenician, Greek, Etruscan and Latin, and the long-standing problem that no alphabet maps one-to-one onto the sounds of speech, leaving the transliterator to choose between the written and the spoken form.