Vol. 41:1

The Bible never mentions the Battle of Qarqara (853 BCE), in which King Ahab of Israel joined a coalition of Aramean and Phoenician rulers to halt the advance of Shalmaneser III of Assyria — an episode recoverable only from Shalmaneser's own Monolith Inscription. The author reconstructs how the League of Qarqara was assembled, tallies its combined forces against Assyria's, and shows that Ahab's contribution of 2,000 chariots was larger than that of every other member of the coalition combined, a figure that fits comfortably with the military buildup attested archaeologically at Samaria, Megiddo, and Hazor. She closes by weighing why the biblical narrator, so attentive to Ahab's wars against Aram, passed over in total silence a campaign in which Israel's role may have been decisive.

At a traditional circumcision the mohel recites the opening verses of parashat Pinhas, and designates an honorary seat for the prophet Elijah. The author traces both customs to a midrashic identification of Elijah with Phinehas, and argues that this pairing carries a deeper thematic link to circumcision itself — through Maimonides' rationale that circumcision tempers excessive lust, through the semantic overlap between beriti (covenant) and berit milah, and through the ironic contrast between Phinehas's pure zealotry and his tribe's earlier, abused use of circumcision against the Shechemites.

Elisha follows Elijah's example so closely that the text underscores the connection through the cloak, the parting of the Jordan, and the repeated cry 'Father, father, Israel's chariots and horsemen!' Yet the two prophets diverge sharply in temperament and method: Elijah is a self-reliant, dramatic loner who deals harshly with his enemies, while Elisha works through a community of prophets and disciples, treats enemy soldiers leniently, and involves himself deeply in the political fortunes of the monarchy. The article argues that although Elijah's public confrontations were the more dramatic, Elisha's quieter statesmanship — arranging the anointing of Hazael and Jehu — had the greater long-term effect on Israel's political history.

Daniel chapter 3, the story of Hananiah, Mishael and Azariah's rescue from Nebuchadnezzar's furnace, is the only chapter in the Book of Daniel in which Daniel himself does not appear. The author argues that this absence is not, as critical scholars suggest, evidence that the chapter is an unrelated interpolation, but a deliberate structural echo of Genesis 38, the story of Judah and Tamar, which similarly interrupts the Joseph narrative without mentioning Joseph. Both digressions tell of a righteous figure saved from death by fire, both feature a condemning authority who later admits his error, and rabbinic tradition ties the two together by attributing the youths' salvation to the merit of their ancestor Judah, casting both episodes as milestones on the road to the Davidic monarchy.

Rabbinic tradition holds that Torah has shiv'im panim, seventy faces, meaning that a single verse can sustain many, even contradictory, correct interpretations. The author illustrates this principle by cataloguing more than a dozen classical and original readings of the phrase 'and behold, it was very good' in Genesis 1:31, grouping them into three families: readings that locate the 'very good' in a particular feature of creation, readings that find it in the value of moral struggle and conflicting possibilities, and readings that see it as marking an advance to a higher stage of development. The survey is offered as a demonstration, not just a description, of pluralistic interpretation in action.

The Bible never states how long Joshua ruled, and the traditional figure of 28 years — built on the assumption that Joshua was Caleb's contemporary and required patching with 24 extra years borrowed from two periods of subjugation — produces an inconsistent chronology and an implausibly elderly commander at the conquest of Canaan. The author derives Joshua's age independently from the Numbers narrative of the spies, showing he was 19 at the Exodus and therefore 59 when his rule began, giving him a 52-year reign that both fits a more plausible age for his military campaigns and reconciles exactly with the 300 years Jephthah cites from the conquest of Sihon to his own judgeship.

Psalm 46 has long resisted being read as a unified composition, appearing instead to combine natural imagery, a portrait of the City of God, and martial triumph. The author identifies two overlapping structures in the psalm — one marked by the refrain selah into three equal stanzas, another organized thematically into a natural motif and a martial motif — and argues that the City of God is the point where both structures, and both themes, converge: a place whose peace from nature's chaos is itself a metaphor for its Divine protection from human enemies. The article then surveys the messianic, historical, metaphoric, and synthesis readings of the classical and modern commentators to show how each fits, and fails fully to fit, this proposed structure.

Responding to an earlier JBQ article that argued the biblical blue dye tekhelet was deliberately concealed to curb overly enthusiastic mystics, the author rebuts both of its proof texts concerning Rabbi Meir and argues that seeking to behold the Divine Presence was never considered a transgression in rabbinic literature. He instead reviews other rabbinic uses of the term nignaz (stored away), proposing that tekhelet's disappearance is better explained by kings hoarding it for royal use, making it too dangerous for ordinary Jews to wear, rather than by any deliberate suppression of mystical practice.

Maimonides' eighth principle of faith holds that the Torah text in our hands is entirely divine, yet the Masoretic tradition itself contains variants, and rabbinic sources acknowledge that portions of the text were transmitted or corrected by human hands. The author argues that Maimonides' principle, properly read, requires only that Moses contributed no independent input to the text he received at Sinai, and does not foreclose the possibility that the text was subsequently corrupted and later reconstructed by Ezra the Scribe. Drawing on Marc B. Shapiro's survey of textual variants and David Weiss Halivni's theory of Chate'u Yisrael, the article proposes a modus vivendi that lets an Orthodox Bible student accept the findings of textual criticism without abandoning belief in the Torah's divine origin.

II Samuel 24 treats David's census of Israel and Judah as a grievous sin punished by a plague of 70,000 dead, but the text never states what exactly was wrong with counting the people — especially since Saul had done the same without consequence. Rather than the usual explanations (omitting the half-shekel, royal pride, misplaced trust in numbers), the author proposes that David's real transgression was the purpose behind the census: mustering a population for forced labor (mas) to build the Temple and royal structures, a policy of corvée that, traced through Adoram's later role under Solomon and Rehoboam, directly precipitated the revolt that split the kingdom.

The hapax legomenon keseh in Psalm 81:4 has been read as 'covered' (referring to the moon at Rosh Ha-Shanah or, per JPS, the full moon), and by Rashi, Ibn Ezra and Radak as 'the appointed time,' but none of these readings sits comfortably with the verse's plain sense. Noting that verse 3 pairs two musical instruments with no occasion specified, while verse 4 pairs the shofar with a specific day, the author argues by parallelism that keseh names a second instrument, and proposes deriving it from kesef ('silver'), so that the verse describes the shofar sounded on Rosh Ha-Shanah alongside silver trumpets used on the new month generally.

A review of Hillel Millgram's two-volume The Invention of Monotheist Ethics: Exploring the Book of Samuel (University Press of America, 2010), which the reviewer treats as, in substance, a fresh verse-by-verse commentary on the Book of Samuel. Focusing on the opening chapter's story of Hannah, the review highlights three nuances Millgram draws out — the fractured unhappiness shared by Elkanah, Peninnah and Hannah alike, Eli's failure to distinguish a drunkard from a woman pouring out her heart in prayer, and the shift in Hannah's own prayer from what she lacks to what she can give — as evidence of a commentary that renews a text the reviewer thought he already knew well.