Vol. 38:4

Contrasts Abraham's failed plea for justice on behalf of Sodom with Lot's successful, self-interested appeal to save Zoar, tracing the leitwort na through both men's speeches to argue that Lot's rescue turns on an appeal to mercy rather than merit, while Abraham's demand for universal justice leaves no room for a personal exception.

Surveys the three main scholarly approaches to the closing verse of Kohelet's 'royal fiction' — reading it as poetic justice, Divine arbitrariness, or a later pious gloss — and argues that each is internally inconsistent with Ecclesiastes' own worldview, concluding that the verse is best understood as a quoted position that Kohelet ultimately rejects as hevel.

Traces the history of interpretation of the Israelites' puzzled exclamation man hu upon first seeing manna, surveying grammarians and commentators who read it as a question in a foreign or archaic dialect, as a declaration that the food was 'prepared' or 'a gift,' or as a spontaneous naming after a familiar desert substance, and shows how each reading resolves the awkward Hebrew of the phrase differently.

Applies intra-biblical interpretation to the elders' blessing over Ruth and Boaz's marriage, arguing that the text deliberately echoes Rachel, Leah, and Tamar to cast Ruth as a culmination of the matriarchal tradition, and contends against Phyllis Trible that Ruth's role is not eclipsed but rather elevated through these allusions, even as Rebekah's absence from the parallel remains a puzzle the Sages themselves noticed.

Examines the grammar of God's enigmatic self-description to Moses at the burning bush, showing how the incomplete-action form of the Hebrew verb h-y-h allows Ehyeh-Asher-Ehyeh to be read as four distinct, mutually exclusive philosophical positions on divine constancy and change, and connects the shift between the first-person Ehyeh and third-person Yod-Heh-Vav-Heh to how God and humanity each refer to the divine name.

Compares the brief account of Israel's victory over the King of Arad in Numbers 21:1-3 and 33:40 with the seemingly parallel episode in Judges 1:16-18, and adopts historian Ze'ev Yavitz's proposal that both describe the same event: an early, independent incursion by the tribe of Judah into Canaan that was later folded into the national narrative and, separately, into Judah's own tribal conquest history.

Weighs the two classical identifications of the second plague of Egypt, tzefarde'a, as either frogs or crocodiles, tracing the crocodile reading through Ibn Ezra, the Midrash ha-Gadol, and Rabbenu Bahya, and the frog reading through etymology and later commentators, and concludes that the etymological and midrashic evidence favors frogs, though a few sources see the term as covering both amphibians and reptiles.

Traces the liturgical formula 'The Lord reigns, has reigned, and will reign forever,' assembled from three separate biblical verses, back to its sole Torah source in the Song at the Sea, and surveys commentators from Rashi through Ramban on whether Exodus 15:18 envisions God's kingship as limited to Israel or extending universally, arguing the tension is echoed in later rabbinic and philosophical formulations of God's eternal nature.

Reviews Rabbi Dr. Meir Levin's The Dawn of Redemption (Urim Publications, 2009), praising its rabbinically-grounded readings of Ruth and Jonah as sources of guidance on alienation and return, while questioning Levin's tendency to present rabbinic literature as a monolithic 'view of the Sages' and his relatively thin engagement with the philosophical implications of intergenerational repair in Ruth.

Reviews Etz Hayim: Torah and Commentary, the Conservative movement's 2001 successor to the Hertz Pentateuch, examining its layered peshat/derash/halakhah le-ma'aseh commentary structure, its treatment of gendered language about God and people compared to two other contemporary liberal Torah commentaries, and its extensive supplementary essays and haftarah commentary.