Vol. 35:2

Job cannot end his life but he can wish for death, and does so repeatedly. Distinguishing the two conceptions at work, this study argues the author uses death-as-extinction when building logical arguments against God, but falls back on the popular notion of Sheol in Job's emotional outbursts.

The nature of Moses' sin at the rock is unclear, Aaron receives the same punishment despite a minor role, and the link between failing to sanctify God's name and being barred from the land is obscure. Reads the episode through psychological transference from the earlier water crisis at Rephidim and Korah's rebellion, where past emotion colours the response to a present event.

Traces the image of Torah as fire from the disputed phrase mimino eshdat lamo in Deuteronomy 33:2 — rendered by the Masoretic tradition as a fiery law, and by Onkelos as given from amidst the fire — through Rashi's primordial black fire on white fire, Sifre Devarim, and the rabbinic sense that study itself is incendiary.

The Book of Jonah contains only five Hebrew words of prophetic speech, and even those were cancelled — leaving Jonah looking like a false prophet by the test of Deuteronomy 18:22. Argues the book is not primarily about repentance, which would make its first two chapters superfluous, but an exploration of what passes between a prophet and God once the status has been granted.

Abraham's story reads as a patchwork of journeys, challenges and separations. Taking Lekh Lekha and the Akedah as matching bookends, the article maps the intervening narrative as a chiasm — Sarah twice taken, Lot twice rescued, two covenants — and finds, unexpectedly, the birth of Ishmael occupying the central and therefore most emphatic position.

A response to Josiah Derby's calculation that the Ark weighed some 288 pounds — too heavy for four men, yet Scripture has it carried on their shoulders repeatedly. Correcting the density of ancient gold, the thickness of the overlay, the length of the cubit and the weight of the Tablets brings the figure down to about 183 pounds.

Numbers 25 introduces Phinehas by having him impale an Israelite man and a Midianite woman, after which a plague killing 24,000 ends and he is rewarded with the priesthood for all time. Works through three theological and ethical difficulties: what function the punishment serves, how the deaths of the likely innocent make expiation, and whether Phinehas acted as hero or vigilante.

Every letter of the word kissed in Genesis 33:4 carries a Masoretic dot. Weighs the readings this provoked — that the dots diminish the word and the kiss was insincere, that they add to it and Esau was genuinely moved, and R. Yannai's proposal that Esau meant to bite rather than kiss — against Ibn Ezra's dismissal of the whole exercise as child's play.

Elliot Rabin's introduction for the uninitiated organises the Hebrew Bible by genre — storytelling, law, history, prophecy, wisdom and poetry. The review finds him strongest on the literary sections and commends his willingness to confront the archaeological silence around the Patriarchs and the Exodus, while noting the question he leaves unanswered: how so inconsistent a book turned the western world to monotheism.

Two letters. The first qualifies Jeffrey Cohen's comparison of Abraham and Melchizedek, noting that Abraham too kept his guests outside the tent. The second argues that the childlessness of David and Michal is a deliberate biblical judgment, since a son of theirs would have carried royal blood from both Saul and David.