Vol. 35:1

Kings devotes more space to Ahab than to any other northern monarch, and opens with a condemnation that colours everything after it. Weighing the talmudic dispute between R. Nahman, who held Ahab equally balanced, and R. Joseph, who did not, the essay examines Jezebel's degree of influence and the genuinely positive aspects of the reign.

Reuben and Gad ask to settle the grazing land east of the Jordan, and Moses reacts with fury before accepting their offer to fight alongside the other tribes. The compromise answers his stated objection but leaves a larger question untouched: the promised land never included territory east of the river, so on whose authority was the request granted at all?

Modern printing signals emphasis with boldface, de-emphasis with parentheses, unity with paragraphing. Argues the biblical authors achieved the same effects by other means — word repetition, the Masoretic dotting of a word, parallel verbal structures, repeated connectives — and reads these as intended formatting rather than later exegetical overlay, following Hirsch's model of the Written Law as lecture notes.

Pirke Avot sets the disciples of Abraham against those of Balaam the wicked. Beyond that pairing the article finds real symmetries: both came from Aram Naharaim, both were first prophets — one within Israel, one outside it — both set out on missions that produced the opposite of what was intended, and both saddled their own asses, which the midrash reads as love and hatred alike upsetting the natural order.

Where Greek tragedy turns on fate, biblical tragedy turns on a flaw in the central character — closer to Shakespeare than to Sophocles. Reads Judges 13-16 in three acts, Promising Youth, As a Driven Leaf and Downfall, following a man given supernatural strength and a nazirite calling he never understood, whose actions against the Philistines are private vengeance rather than deliverance.

Removing a shoe marks a loss of dignity, transfers property, and is required in holy places — so the shoe is at once dignified dress and a thing of dust. Traces that double sense through the halitzah ceremony of levirate marriage, the Burning Bush, and Amos, noting that Hebrew has no word for wearing shoes, only for being barefoot.

The third in a series on the psalms sharing a four-word superscription with Psalms 47 and 49. Rearranged into parallel configurations, Psalm 85's movement from past forgiveness through present petition to anticipated deliverance becomes more emphatic, and its closing verse reads as much as expectation as assurance.

God promises the covenant through Isaac, then commands his sacrifice. Approaching that contradiction through Rembrandt, who paints Abraham covering his son's eyes — a father who cannot look into them and still strike — and through Levinas, for whom Abraham saw God in Isaac's face and heard 'thou shalt not kill', making the episode an assertion of the ethical rather than its suspension.

Two letters. Stein corrects several citations in Herbert Block's essay distinguishing Jacob from Israel, and offers a reading of Genesis 49:2 in which hearing is passive and listening active. Tourkin-Komet, a poet, takes issue with Dan Vogel's description of Yakov Azriel's verse as mostly free, arguing it carries considerable internal rhyme.

In Ethiopia the meeting of the two monarchs is not literature but foundation document. Follows the terse biblical account through centuries of accretion into the Kebra Nagast, where the Queen converts and bears Solomon a son, Menelik, who brings the Ark to Axum — legitimising a Solomonic dynasty that ran to Haile Selassie as its 225th ruler.