Vol. 34:3

Melchizedek brought bread and wine out to Abraham on the road; Abraham brought his three visitors inside. Setting the two acts side by side explains why only one man became the byword for hospitality — the chain of verbs in Genesis 18 has an aged man two days from circumcision running, hurrying, running again, and standing over his guests himself rather than delegating.

Takes 'pun' broadly — innuendo, witticism, paronomasia — and surveys the technique in talmudic and midrashic exegesis under two methods, the exception and the alternate explanation. Cases turn on spelling, style, phrasing and numerical coincidence: David losing his title on his deathbed, the cantillation of Isaiah 45:1 separating the anointed from Cyrus, and the one grandchild in Numbers 26 whose name already contains the divine letters.

Two names in one man, and God uses both in a single verse. Argues the choice is never idle: the compliant Jacob who outwitted Laban by subtlety could not be the patriarch who names a people, and after the night struggle a second character resides alongside the first — Israel surfacing wherever the text calls for decision and strong action.

Leviant objects that Joel Litke's essay on Rashi's view of Genesis excoriates Canaanite immorality while passing over the moral lapses of the Israelite heroes — Judah and Tamar, Reuben and Bilhah, David and Bathsheba, and the slaughter at Shechem. Litke replies that Rashi's concern is the justification for assigning the land, and that the conduct of the patriarchs has no bearing on that comment.

Unlike rain, springs or brooks, a well is an invention — it takes tools, knowledge of the terrain, and the strength to hold it against envious neighbours. Sets out ten functions the well serves in the Tanakh, from bare survival (Hagar and Ishmael in the wilderness) to the emotional (David craving water from the well at Bethlehem's gate, then pouring it out as a libation) and the celebratory alliteration of matzanu mayim.

Poetry as one of the seventy ways of reading a text. Azriel's free verse mostly earns its form, using the line break to weight the words on either side of it, and his best poem — 'The Sacrifice of Sarah' — lifts the Akedah out of millennia of philosophical justification and hands its enormity to a single character, the mother.

Much has been written on the religious and social meaning of the sabbatical year, little on its chronological use. Because the cycle is short enough that it could never be lost track of while the people were in the land, any two attested sabbaticals must be an exact multiple of seven years apart — a check on any chronology derived from reign lengths. Applies that constraint, with the remarks in Seder Olam, to the 587 versus 586 date for the burning of the First Temple.

Judges 6-7 runs the standard cycle to its close, and then Chapter 8 keeps going. Every act in that chapter can be both justified and condemned — the torture at Succoth, the massacre at Penuel that exceeded the threat, the personal grievance offered in place of a claim of authority. Chapter 9 then splits the ambiguity in two, Jotham carrying Gideon's best and Abimelech his worst, making the reign the turning point of the book.

A sequel to two earlier essays on Minimalism, which held that the Hebrew Bible is essentially a product of the Persian or Greek era. Surveys the question of dependence and borrowing between Zoroastrianism and biblical religion, setting it beside the well-attested Mesopotamian parallels and the Egyptian coloration of Genesis 38 to Exodus 14, and notes where the Persian loanwords do — and pointedly do not — appear.