Vol. 40:4
Amzallag and Avriel argue that the Song of the Sea (Exodus 15:1-21) was composed to be performed not by a single voice but antiphonally, in 'cross-responsa' fashion, by two choirs singing paired verses in ascending and descending order around a central axis. Splitting each verse into four units using the Masoretic cantillation's pausal markers, they show that pairing verses 1 with 21, 2 with 19, and so on down to the central 10/11 pair produces a strikingly symmetrical, coherent composite text — resolving longstanding puzzles about the status of verse 19 and the so-called Song of Miriam without emending the Masoretic Text. They conclude that apparent structural anomalies in this and other biblical psalms may reflect an antiphonal mode of performance rather than textual corruption.
Zucker traces a chain of deliberate literary patterning running from Moses through Joshua and from Elijah through Elisha: shared forty-day sojourns and theophanies at Horeb/Sinai, twelve memorial stones, publicly designated successors, divine fire, and the splitting of the Jordan and the Sea of Reeds. He argues that the Elijah-Elisha narratives in Kings consciously present Elijah as a 'Moses redivivus' and Elisha as a latter-day Joshua, so that each pair of leaders in Israel's history is understood through, and legitimized by, the pattern set by its predecessor.
Bar surveys the Bible's vocabulary for death in battle (the roots n-f-l and h-l-l, and idioms like halalei herev and metei milhamah) and argues that death in war, unlike natural death, was regarded as an unnatural death and a curse — a punishment for Israel's sins, paralleled in Assyrian and Babylonian treaty curses and royal inscriptions. He further shows that non-burial of the war-dead, exemplified by Saul and by the taunts exchanged between David and Goliath, compounded that curse, since the Bible and the ancient Near East alike regarded denial of burial as worse than death itself.
Sussman argues that Psalm 68, David's hymn of victory, deliberately echoes the Song of Deborah in Judges 5, a connection noted by Buttenwieser and Pollack but passed over by nearly all the classical commentators. Comparing parallel language about God going forth from Seir, the earth quaking and the heavens dripping, the enumeration of tribes, and shared repetitive cadences, she concludes that recognizing these allusions clarifies the psalm's theme: David, like Deborah before him, attributes a hard-won military victory to God's providential intervention rather than to strength or strategy alone.
Nataf takes up the Talmud's puzzle (TB Berakhot 13a) over why the Torah keeps using the name Ya'akov after God renames him Yisrael, even though the text seems to prohibit exactly that. Rather than accepting the Talmud's own answer as fully satisfying, he argues that Jacob uniquely carries two coexisting essential identities — the sheltered, roundabout Ya'akov of his youth and the bold, confrontational Yisrael forged at the Jabbok — and traces this duality through his two households, his sons' rivalry, and the recurring literary pairings of the two names through the end of Genesis and beyond.
Miller argues that the Akedah, the Revelation at Sinai, and the episode at Marah share a single literary structure built around the third day, an isolated mountain location, and the language of nissah ('trial' or 'test'), producing a recurring pattern of perceived danger followed by divine deliverance. Reading this pattern through Nahmanides, he concludes that the Torah's tests are never meant to harm the one being tested — a fundamental premise for the unconditional, non-sacrificial acceptance of the Torah at Sinai.
Newman proposes that Joseph's interpretation of Pharaoh's dreams succeeded, where the Egyptian wise men's had failed, because it drew on imagery already loaded with meaning for Pharaoh: the goddess Hathor, visualized as a great cow associated with the Nile's annual flooding and the resulting harvest, and often appearing in groups of seven as a foreteller of the future. Both the seven cows emerging from the Nile and the seven ears of corn, he argues, would have called Hathor's fertility symbolism immediately to Pharaoh's mind, explaining why Joseph's reading of the dream as a unified whole rang true where the Egyptian priests' fragmented explanations had not.
Blumenthal reads the ten plagues as a systematic confrontation between Israelite monotheism and specific dogmas of Egyptian polytheism: the belief that slaves had no personal relationship with the gods, and that Pharaoh himself was the divine son of the sun-god Ra. Grouping the plagues into animals-turned-attackers, animal deities struck with sickness, and the direct disabling of the Nile and of Ra's sunlight, he argues that the plagues were designed not merely to punish Egypt but to demonstrate, plague by plague, that the previously 'nonexistent' God of the enslaved Hebrews could overpower Egypt's entire pantheon.
Bakon asks why the Torah bothers to record Jacob's second dream at Haran — an unglamorous vision of streaked, speckled, and mottled goats mating — when his first dream, of angels ascending and descending a ladder, was full of promise and reassurance. He argues that the mundane content of the second dream is itself the point: it dramatizes how far the spiritual heir of Abraham and Isaac had drifted into becoming Laban's master breeder, and God's reintroduction as 'the God of Beth-el' is a pointed reminder of the man Jacob was meant to be, prompting his return to the land of his fathers.
Keiter connects the raven and dove that Noah sends from the ark to the character of the prophet Jonah — whose name means 'dove' — arguing that Noah dispatched the scavenging raven not to test for dry land but out of fear that the earth was strewn with corpses, and sent the homing dove to learn, indirectly, whether his own former home was habitable again. Building on the observation that doves fly home, and that the dove's final failure to return is what finally releases Noah from the ark, she argues that both Noah and Jonah share the same instinct to retreat into a safe 'nest' rather than confront the human cost of catastrophe, and that both are ultimately taught the same lesson in empathy.
Backon reexamines the description of Sarah as akarah, ein lah valad ('barren, she had no valad') and argues, against the standard rendering of valad as 'child,' that the phrase is a technical description of what modern medicine calls polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS). Reading akarah in its literal sense of 'unattached' and valad as the developing ovarian follicle, and drawing on Ralbag's linkage of Sarah's infertility to her weight, he proposes that Genesis 11:30 and 18:11 together describe a reversible endocrine condition rather than an anatomical defect, with implications for understanding Isaac's temperament as well.
Adler reports on the 49th International Bible Contest for Jewish Youth, held on Israel's Independence Day, in which a tie between Akiva Abramowitz of Brooklyn and Aaron Goldberg of Toronto led organizers to declare both overseas champions, while at the main contest the Israeli Elchanan Bloch of Netivot won the international title after a quick-fire tiebreaker with American finalist Akiva Abramowitz. The report also covers the record 12,600 Israeli pupils who took part in local Hidon competitions and the contest's theme of social justice, drawn from Micah 6:8.
Zucker reviews JPS Guide: The Jewish Bible (Project Editor Carol Hupping, Jewish Publication Society, 2008), praising its sixteen introductory chapters and extensive reference apparatus — glossary, timelines, chronologies, maps — as a well-written resource for both general readers and scholars that fairly represents both source-critical and traditional approaches to the Bible's composition. He flags several proofreading errors, including a chart that misplaces Zechariah and Malachi among the Writings and misspellings of Betzalel and Northvale, but concludes that these are minor blemishes on a genuinely valuable book.
Responding to Stanley Schneider and Morton Seelenfreund's article on kotnot or (Genesis 3:21), which noted a variant spelling with an aleph in place of the standard ayin, Pinker connects that variant reading to Genesis 3:17 through wordplay between kotnot or (aleph-vav-resh) and arur ('cursed,' aleph-resh-vav-resh-he). He proposes that kotnot or should instead be read as 'garments for the curse' — protective clothing given to Adam and Eve to help them survive under the curse just pronounced upon them.