Vol. 35:3
Early midrash tends to excuse the failings of biblical figures, casting Jacob as the tzadik and Esau as the wicked brother — a reading that departs sharply from the plain sense of the text. This study traces that tendency and the counter-school of midrash that answered it, reasserting Divine fairness through measure-for-measure justice.
Jacob's flight from Laban produces a double deception: Jacob conceals his departure and Rachel steals the terafim, both described with the same verb for stealing. Following that vocabulary, the article shows a pattern of retaliation running through the patriarchal narratives — the deceiver of Isaac becoming, in turn, the one deceived.
Psalm 47 shares its four-word superscription with only Psalms 49 and 85. Rearranging its verses into parallel sets — reading verses 7 and 8 together and splitting verse 10 — brings out an emblematic, stair-like structure that makes the enthronement psalm's argument more emphatic without altering its message.
Proposes that the test at Moriah was not whether Abraham would obey. Child sacrifice was unremarkable among his contemporaries, so obedience would have distinguished neither him nor his God. On this reading God sought an argument from Abraham's ethical nature, and the episode establishes once and for all that human sacrifice is not wanted.
Bittul hayesh — the surrender of thought, desire and life to the Divine will — is often credited to Platonism, but the article traces it through the Bible itself: Adam's sin, Abraham as dust and ashes, the humility of Moses, David's dance, the pilgrimage festivals, and martyrdom. Draws on the Malbim and Soloveitchik's ontic monism.
Traces the association of Jews with usury from the papal prohibitions through to Shakespeare, then shows that Shylock — an observant Jew — is made to violate four biblical and talmudic laws on lending that he would have known. Concludes that the portrayal reveals more about the playwright's grasp of human character than about Judaism.
Ruth inverts the pattern of Esther, Joseph and Daniel: a foreigner who succeeds in Israel rather than an Israelite who succeeds abroad. And she is a Moabite, on whom the ban of Deuteronomy 23:4 should have fallen. Follows the hesed extended by Boaz and the strategy devised by Naomi to the line that leads to King David.
The Babylonian and Roman exiles are presented in Scripture as consequences of failure, but no reason is given for the Egyptian bondage — it is foretold to Abraham generations before Israel exists. Argues the Egyptian experience was a crucible rather than a punishment, forming a people able to accept the Covenant they had never been asked to agree to.
Gevaryahu adds a commentary Michael Avioz's survey of Da'at Mikra passed over — Avraham Kahana's Tanach im Perush Mada'i, published from 1902 and reprinted in Israel, which Segal's own history of exegesis also ignored. Eder answers Israel Stein on sacred space and holy time by listing the other holinesses the Tanakh knows: God Himself, a kingdom of priests, the sons of Aaron, the nazirites, and even holy water.
Moses asks only for a glimpse of the good land, and a commentary notes that what he saw was not the land but the good in it — where the spies had seen the bad. Read alongside Heschel's three kinds of seeing, aesthetic, moral and religious, as an argument for looking at Israel with a willing eye.
The name lists that fill Ezra-Nehemiah struck Josephus as an obstacle to the narrative, and he omitted them. Reading them instead as deliberate literary devices, this study argues they convey the scale of the return and the significance of each participant — and that their bulk offsets the book's conspicuously brief account of the Second Temple's dedication.