Vol. 41:2

Reads the Eden narrative by looking at it rather than only reading it — recovering the visual setting a listening audience would have pictured, in an era when the Bible was heard far more often than read. Attention to the garden's concrete furniture brings out imagery that later biblical texts and the midrashim pick up, and that mainstream Jewish readings of the story largely pass over: Eden as the first sanctuary.

Judges closes with two disturbing stories, both framed by the refrain that there was no king in Israel. Asks why the two provoked such different responses: the Danites steal Micah's idol and found an idolatrous shrine with no reprisal at all, while the outrage at Gibeah brings the whole nation to war against Benjamin. Answers from the rabbinic reading, which also explains why Israel's first assaults on Benjamin failed.

Traces the question of who wrote Kohelet from Seder Olam Rabbah and Kohelet Rabbati, which assign it to Solomon in his old age, through Luzzatto — the first Jewish commentator to deny Solomonic authorship, arguing for a post-exilic writer who borrowed Solomon's name to borrow his authority.

There is no formal conversion procedure anywhere in the Torah: those who joined Israel did so by leaving home and living among them. Against that, and against the scale of conversion implied by the population between the two destructions, examines Jethro — introduced in Exodus 2 marrying Zipporah to Moses, and treated as a proselyte on the strength of his much later return in Exodus 18.

Opens on the three verses that set up Deborah's war — Jabin of Hazor, Sisera and his nine hundred iron chariots, twenty years of oppression — in a period without national unity or religious authority. Draws the parallel the text itself invites, between deliverance from Sisera and deliverance from Pharaoh, each crowned by a song of triumph.

I Samuel 28 reports Saul consulting the witch of En-Dor, who raises Samuel to reconfirm the end of his kingdom. Notes that the chapter repeats Samuel's death and burial, already recorded when they happened, and reads the repetition as deliberately linking the two events — while questioning Rashi's explanation, which sits awkwardly against the statement that prophet and king had ceased to meet even in Samuel's lifetime.

The daughters of Zelophehad appear twice in Numbers, and their plea turns on a single verb: why should their father's name be withdrawn — yiggara — from his family for want of a son? Follows that root through the plea, the Lord's reply granting them their father's inheritance, and its other appearances in the Bible.

Exodus 4:24-26 — the Lord seeking to kill Moses on the road, and Zipporah's circumcision of their son — has resisted explanation: why would God attack His agent of redemption immediately after appointing him? Argues the episode is not incidental but fundamental to the Exodus narrative and to how Moses is to be judged, reading it against the Joseph story.

The verse that closes Grace after Meals exists in two forms, one from II Samuel 22 and one from Psalm 18, differing at verse 51 between the participle magdil, He magnifies, and the noun migdol, a tower. Weighs the linguistic case for the Psalms reading against the Masoretic keri and ketiv in Samuel, where the same consonants are read one way and written the other, and traces how the liturgy accommodated both.

Joel is placed between Hosea and Amos yet cannot be dated: proposals range across three centuries, and he is tied to no particular time or place, which has cost him attention. Takes up his central vision of the four locusts — plague or figure for Israel's enemies — and the way he answers his fellow prophets, reversing Isaiah's swords into ploughshares and borrowing Amos's roaring lion.

The fourth commandment grounds the Sabbath in creation: God laboured six days and rested on the seventh. Takes up the difficulty in that account — what it can mean for God to rest — reading the Exodus formulation against the three different verbs Genesis 2:1-3 uses for finishing and resting.