Vol. 40:3

Reading the Scroll of Esther against the golden calf narrative of Exodus 32-34, this article argues that Esther is at its core a parody of Divine anger — human tempers, Ahasuerus's and Haman's, mirror but trivialize the terrifying, ultimately forgiving anger of God. Gertel traces the careful way the Hebrew text reserves the term af for Divine wrath while assigning hemah and katzaf to the human actors, and shows how rabbinic and kabbalistic tradition already read many of the Megillah's references to 'the king' as veiled allusions to the Divine King. The essay concludes that the two narratives of anger and grace, though differing in vocabulary, both move toward redemption — one through repentance, the other through charm and providence.

Noting that the Ark of the Covenant is present in Solomon's Temple but absent by the time of the Second Temple's dedication, this article surveys the usual suspects — Pharaoh Shishak, King Jehoash of Israel, and Nebuchadnezzar — and finds none of them a likely culprit, since the Bible never actually credits any of them with taking it. Ehrlich instead proposes that Queen Athaliah, the Baal-worshipping usurper who nearly destroyed the Davidic line, had the Ark secretly removed or destroyed in retaliation for Jehu's slaughter of her family, and that the priesthood then concealed its absence rather than admit the loss. He reads Josiah's otherwise puzzling instruction to 'put the Holy Ark' back in the Temple, and Jeremiah's declaration that the Ark will no longer be missed or remade, as evidence that its disappearance long predated the Babylonian destruction.

Cohen argues that the term ge'ulah (redemption) in the Book of Ruth carries a theological weight beyond its legal sense in Deuteronomy, pointing toward the eschatological hope of an enduring Davidic line rather than merely the mechanics of land redemption and levirate marriage. Linking Ruth to the Judah-Tamar episode of Genesis 38 through their shared genealogical stakes, he contends that the 'redeemer' the book pursues in its narrow family drama ultimately points to the future Messianic king. The article situates this claim within the broader biblical eschatological complex found in Isaiah and Jeremiah's prophecies of an unending Davidic throne.

Reading midrashic comments on Exodus 14, Adler notices that Rashi's Mekhilta-based commentary seems to praise Pharaoh's generalship — his personal preparation of his mount, his promise to share the spoils, and his willingness to lead from the front — in implicit contrast to Moses' failure to win the Israelites' full confidence at the Red Sea. He compares this to historical instances of admired enemy commanders, such as Robert E. Lee and Erwin Rommel, and suggests the Midrash's point is less an endorsement of Pharaoh than a lesson that even one's adversaries can model qualities of leadership worth learning from.

Maller reads the Tower of Babel story as a response to trauma rather than to hubris: a post-Flood humanity, still fearful and vulnerable, sought safety and conformity through mass-produced brick construction rather than through the diversity and dispersal that God had commanded. Manufactured, uniform bricks — as opposed to the natural, unhewn stones the Torah later prefers for altars — become in his reading a symbol of the builders' desire to erase individual difference in favor of an anxious collective sameness. God's confounding of their language is thus reinterpreted as a corrective that forced beneficial linguistic, cultural, and religious diversity rather than a punishment for architectural ambition.

Sigalov reexamines the long-debated corner boards of the Tabernacle's wooden framework, arguing that the traditional Talmudic solution, Rabbi Nehemyah's in TB Shabbat 98, produces boards so thick that all 48 together would have weighed roughly 34 metric tons — far more than the eight oxen of Numbers 7:8 could plausibly haul. He proposes instead that the two 'corner boards' of Exodus 26:23-25 were each formed by bending and 'twinning' two ordinary boards into a hollow, cylindrical column, yielding boards only about a centimeter thick and roughly 14 kilograms apiece. The article works through the geometry in detail and suggests the same round-cornered logic may also clarify obscure architectural language elsewhere in the Bible, including Ezekiel's Temple vision and Solomon's Molten Sea.

Kee argues that the puzzling dual-form spelling of mayim (water) and shamayim (sky) is not merely a grammatical quirk but preserves an ancient conception of water as an original single mass later split into two — the waters above the firmament and the waters below. He traces this idea through the 'chaos-order' pattern of Genesis 1, where the raki'a divides the waters, and through the Babylonian Enuma Elish, where Marduk cleaves the sea-goddess Tiamat's body to form the sky from one half. The parallel, he suggests, shows that Israelites and their Mesopotamian neighbors shared a common cosmological picture of water as an original duality, later fractured into the waters above and below.

Surveying scholarship including Lisbeth Fried's reading of Isaiah 45:1, Reiss argues that Deutero-Isaiah cast the Persian king Cyrus — not merely as a temporary instrument of divine will, as Nebuchadnezzar had been for Jeremiah — but as a genuine, if temporary, messianic figure: God's anointed, entrusted with rebuilding Jerusalem and returning the exiles. He shows the striking parallels between Isaiah's oracle and the language of the Cyrus Cylinder, and concludes that Cyrus's historical policy of religious restoration allowed him to be seen, in the theology of Deutero-Isaiah, as having actually fulfilled a redemptive, quasi-Davidic role.

Apple examines why the Book of Psalms opens with ashrei ha-ish, 'happy is the man,' and argues that the choice of a Wisdom poem as the Psalter's opening statement reflects an ancient debate over whether the sage or the pietist represents the ideal Jewish type. Working through the aleph-shin-resh root behind ashrei — which can suggest stepping, forward motion, or being 'confirmed' and validated — he contends that the happiness described is not ecstatic emotion but a settled, active state of mind that comes from a directed, Torah-oriented life. He concludes that Psalm 1's happy man is best read not as a specific historical figure such as David, but as a Wisdom-literature type embodying contentment earned through righteousness rather than religious excitement.

Levenson reviews James Kugel's How to Read the Bible, engaging Kugel's central and provocative thesis that the Hebrew Bible as we know it is entirely the creation of a body of 'early interpreters,' active roughly from 300 BCE to 200 CE, who invested originally etiological, non-moralizing ancient texts with the four assumptions of eternal relevance, coherence, divine origin, and hidden meaning — and that modern biblical scholarship and traditional Judaism are therefore permanently irreconcilable. Surveying critical responses from William Kolbrener, John C. Reeves, and Benjamin Sommer, Levenson adds his own objection rooted in canonical criticism and inner-biblical interpretation: since later biblical texts, such as Jeremiah and Ezekiel reworking Deuteronomy, already treated earlier texts as authoritative Scripture, that scriptural status did not have to wait for Kugel's 'early interpreters' to arrive. He concludes that Kugel's either/or framing sells short both the antiquity of scripture-like reading within the Bible itself and the possibility of holding historical criticism and religious meaning together.