Vol. 34:2
Jeremiah accepted the future he foresaw and worked against it; Jonah fled from it. Balaam did neither, and travelled with two servants who stand for the split in him — the true prophet and the man who wanted Israel's destiny altered. Following Maimonides in taking the episode as prophetic vision, reads the donkey as the inner voice of witchcraft and the sword-bearing angel as coming for the prophet in him, not the man.
What kind of king has no subject and no realm? Creation makes God King, and in the same act limits Him — not for want of power but because among His powers is the power to limit Himself. Traces that self-limitation through the kabbalistic tzimtzum and through free will, nature and logic, and asks what consolation the Kaddish imagines mere creatures offering their Creator.
Joshua appointed no successor, and the tribes were left in the hills while the Canaanites held the fortified lowlands. Reads the two accounts of the victory over Sisera — the narrative of Judges 4 and the song of Judges 5 — and asks what makes the ode one of the finest in world literature: its invocation of heaven and earth after the manner of Haazinu, and a parallelism whose symmetry is itself an image of certitude.
A son of Javan is Dodanim in Genesis 10 and Rodanim in I Chronicles 1. Genesis Rabbah reads the pair as a lesson — cousins when Israel is high, oppressors when it is low. Radak answers that dalet and resh simply look alike, and that Scripture preserved both readings. Sets these against a third approach, and beside the parallel cases of Deuel/Reuel and Rivlah/Divlah.
Tradition assigns a cause to each later exile — idolatry, bloodshed, causeless hatred — but none to the first. The Talmud blames two selas' worth of wool, yet the enslavement was foretold to Abraham long before Joseph's coat existed. So for once the calamity was not our fault. Turns to Yehuda Halevi's Kuzari for what the Egyptian experience was for: the defeat of despair.
Since the 1880s the theophany hymn opening Nahum has been read as an alphabetic acrostic — the only candidate among the prophets, and if genuine, with Psalms 9-10 the earliest in the Hebrew Bible. Weighs the motives a poet might have for the form (aesthetics, mnemonics, completeness, prowess) against the state of the text, in which the alphabetic order is so truncated that no reader noticed it for two millennia.
Both Abram and Jacob enter Canaan by way of Shechem, and so, on the day they cross the Jordan, do the Israelites. Following Rashi and Nahmanides on the principle that what befell the patriarchs foreshadows their descendants, and Brown-Driver-Briggs on shechem as shoulder, the burden of rule — a place that made its inhabitants feel important, and where affliction ripened: Dinah, the sale of Joseph, the schism of the kingdom.
Hemmed in by a meagre hinterland, the Phoenician city-states took to the sea, and Tyre — a citadel on a quarter-mile of rock, so stoutly walled it withstood sieges for years — became the entrepôt Ezekiel apostrophised as the perfection of beauty. Traces the biblical portrait of that wealth and of the traffic in people denounced by Amos and Joel, and the prophets' confidence that Tyrian arrogance would bring it down.
Reads the massacre at Shechem back into the household that produced it. Leah named her sons for a husband who never loved her; her daughter met the one other man in the Bible described as speaking tenderly to a woman. Jacob's deathbed curse and Simeon's absence from the blessing of Moses suggest the killing was rejected — and Dinah's own preference is never once asked.
Exodus says remember the sabbath, Deuteronomy says observe it — and adds a third verb usually passed over, to make the day. Reads the two versions of the Decalogue as revelation and exposition forty years apart: one giving a cosmological reason under the divine Name of mercy, the other a down-to-earth instruction to a generation born in the desert, grounded in the memory of slavery.
Shamayim exists only in the plural, and so does mayim, which appears one verse later. Kabbalists read esh combined with mayim; Brown-Driver-Briggs reads a shafel prefix meaning 'gives water', the source of rainfall. Setting that beside the Hebrew shin that intensifies a root, and beside a sky that looks blue for the same reason the sea does, gives shamayim as the superlative of water.
Not a replacement for the text but a reality that may lie behind it. Connects the two odd features of the story — Rahab's house built into the wall, and the seven-day procession — and argues that of Yadin's five methods for taking a fortified city, only ruse was open to Joshua. On this reading Rahab's rescue happened earlier than the narrative places it, and the scarlet thread marked the section of wall that would give way.