Vol. 34:1
The last verses of Moses' blessing and the verses of the expulsion from Eden share seven words — kedem, va-yomer, va-y'garesh, va-yishkon, herev, derekh and more. Seven is not chance. Reads the pair as a latch joining the end of the Torah to its beginning, and the entry into a land flowing with milk and honey as the annulment of a sentence of thorns and thistles: a second chance for mankind.
Death and life are in the power of the tongue, and four episodes show it. Adam adds a prohibition God never gave, so that one harmless touch discredits the whole command. Rebekah invites her son's curse onto herself and loses him for twenty years, dying before he returns. Rachel demands children or death, and Jacob curses whoever took the teraphim.
Joshua's tribal allocations follow the topography; Ezekiel's disregard it, and his territories hover over the land with no landmark to anchor them — not even Jerusalem is named. Argues that the boundaries and the allocations should therefore not be mapped together, and that the equal strips express a vision radical for its time: a union of tribes each like his brother, after an old order that had broken apart.
The head of a family of seventy meets the ruler of a mighty kingdom, and all that passes is a question about age. Why record it? Because the emptiness is the point: the parties have no shared agenda. Joseph's brothers ask to sojourn, lagur; Pharaoh answers settle, hoshev. One means to stay temporarily and keep Egypt out; the other wants trustworthy herdsmen in Goshen for good.
Bava Batra reaches no consensus on Job — Jew or gentile, historical or invented, patriarchal age or Second Temple — and that absence of tradition frees a reader to work from the text alone. Argues the book is not only theology but morality, and that the prose frame is indispensable: without the heavenly scene we could not umpire the debate, because we would not know for certain that the suffering was undeserved.
The morning blessings thank God for ordinary moments, and Berakhot ties one of them to washing the face. The biblical record suggests a weightier reason. Sisera, Samson, Saul in the wilderness of Ziph, the mother before Solomon, Jonah in the hold — sleep is where things are lost, and the Assyrian army was unconquerable because it never slept.
Gathers what the Bible prescribes for the bed: words of Torah when you lie down, and against it, Micah's men who design evil on their beds and cannot sleep until they have made someone fall. Then the cases where sleep must wait — the creditor holding a poor man's cloak at sunset, the rash pledge, the harvest — and the Psalmist on the emptiness of rising early and staying up late for bread.
Why should adding a ritual flourish cost two lives, when synagogue leaders have been doing it ever since? Follows the Netziv of Volozhin in reading the strange fire as metaphor: Nadav and Avihu felt themselves ablaze with a private spirituality at the very ceremony meant to bind the priesthood into one, and in serving their own religious need rather than God's command came close to idolatry.
The dictionaries cannot agree what gid hanasheh is — thigh vein, thigh muscle, sciatic nerve — but the root nasheh elsewhere means forgetting, as in the name Joseph gave his firstborn. Reads the injured sinew as a gift of forgetfulness, which reconciliation between Jacob and Esau and between Joseph and his brothers both required, and notes its dark side in Moses' rebuke and in the grudge.
Forty-eight verses, and still no agreed account of why Jonah fled. Abarbanel rejects the midrashic answers; the Jerusalem Talmud's contest between wisdom, prophecy and God sets Jonah against repentance itself but leaves the sailors and the psalm unexplained. Proposes that what Jonah could not accept was mercy extended to pagans — even to sailors who behave better than he does.
On Jeffrey Cohen's essay about the bridegroom of blood. Reiss presses the Arabic hatana, circumcision, against the Hebrew hatan: Zipporah had been married for years, so the words fit her just-circumcised son rather than her husband. And since milah means both circumcision and word, the man with the uncircumcised son is the one who calls himself of uncircumcised lips.
Azeka was among the first cities Joshua took and among the last in Judea to fall, named with Lachish in Jeremiah as the fortified towns still holding out — and a Lachish ostracon from those days reads that the fires of Azeka have been extinguished. Four centuries earlier its residents had box seats over the Valley of Elah, where the stream David drew his five stones from still runs.
Three short books with strong narrative lines, read publicly and known to everyone, put through historical, archaeological and philological deciphering. How did Haman rise so suddenly, and why the tax on the mainland and the islands? Who was the Ploni Almoni with first refusal in Ruth? And a reading of Jonah in which ship, storm, fish and gourd all allegorise the siege of Samaria.