Vol. 41:3

Reading the Book of Jubilees alongside classical midrash on Genesis 1–6:8, Ron shows how this early-second-century-BCE retelling sometimes anticipates rabbinic solutions to biblical difficulties — the pre-solar creation of light, Cain and Abel's wives, Adam's death at 930 — and sometimes diverges sharply from them, as with Jubilees' forty-day purification period before Adam enters Eden, its seven blissful years in the Garden, and its insistence that all animals originally spoke. The article argues that Jubilees functions as an early form of midrashic literature whose interpretations were sometimes absorbed into later rabbinic tradition and sometimes pointedly suppressed.

Chronicles ordinarily excises the northern kingdom's history and its Elijah-Elisha cycle, yet it retains, almost verbatim from I Kings 22, the confrontation between King Ahab and the prophet Micaiah ben Imlah — largely because Judah's King Jehoshaphat is present at the scene. Zucker asks why Ahab tells Jehoshaphat that he 'hates' Micaiah despite the prophet's only appearance being this single chapter, and proposes that Micaiah is the unnamed attendant who accompanies Elijah in I Kings 18-19, making Ahab's hatred of Micaiah an extension of his hatred of Elijah. The article also traces how the episode's contrast between the 'word of the Lord' and the 'spirit of the Lord' serves the Chronicler's broader concern with the divine name and true versus false prophecy.

Continuing a study of the Book of Kohelet, Pinker argues that its recurring themes — vanity, toil, joy, wisdom, death, fear of God, justice, timeliness, and youth — are consistently the preoccupations of the mature and established rather than the young. He proposes that Kohelet is not a single author's treatise but a record of debates conducted within a havurah-like circle, the kohelet, of wealthy, aging Jerusalem patricians under Ptolemaic rule, whose guarded, ambiguous style reflects fear of the regime's reporting apparatus. This, he suggests, explains both the book's contradictions and its eventual admission into the biblical canon.

Bakon draws on rabbinic and medieval close reading to recover the hidden emotional drama beneath the terse account of Joseph's temptation in Genesis 39 — the rare shalshelet cantillation mark on 'but he refused,' signaling hesitation shared with Lot and Eliezer; the Talmud's inference that Joseph nearly succumbed until an image of his father Jacob stopped him; and the recurring word begged ('garment'), whose root evokes betrayal and infidelity. He also contrasts the narrative's psychological subtlety, especially in how Potiphar's wife manipulates her household and her husband, with the plainer parallel Egyptian tale of Anubis and Bata.

Durousseau traces how major Christian Bible translations, from the 1952 RSV through the 2011 NABRE, have progressively corrected the ancient mistranslation of almah as 'virgin' in Isaiah 7:14b, restoring 'young woman' and the definite article, and rendering harah as a present-tense predicate rather than a future verb of conception. He argues this confirms that Isaiah's oracle described an imminent, contemporary birth as a sign to King Ahaz, not a distant virginal conception of the Messiah, and that Matthew's use of the Septuagint's parthenos represents a midrashic pesher rather than the peshat of the Hebrew text.

Though Ezra's genealogy in Ezra 7:1-5 traces him back to Aaron, classical rabbinic sources hold that Jeshua ben Jehozadak, not Ezra, served as high priest of the early Second Temple. Klein surveys a competing medieval tradition — Maimonides, Meiri, and others — that took Ezra himself to have been kohen gadol, tracing the dispute through readings of Mishnah Parah 3:5 on the preparation of the red heifer, and through attempts by Rabbis Emden, Azulai, and Palache to reconcile Maimonides' apparent position with the plain sense of the biblical text. He concludes that most authorities reject the high priest tradition, though Maimonides' own view remains ambiguous.

Cohen revisits the talmudic dispute between Rabbi Johanan and Resh Lakish over whether Noah's righteousness 'in his generation' (be-dorotav, Gen. 6:9) was diminished or enhanced by the wickedness around him, noting that both readings assume a singular be-doro despite the text's actual plural form. Working from the ages at which antediluvian versus postdiluvian patriarchs first fathered children, he argues that be-dorotav is literal: because the human generative age dropped sharply after the Flood, Noah — who lived 950 years, 350 of them after the Flood — personally witnessed roughly ten generations of descendants, far more than any of his forebears, which supports Resh Lakish's view that some of those later generations were not wholly wicked.

Wernick examines Targum Pseudo-Jonathan's midrashic expansion of Genesis 39:1, in which Potiphar buys Joseph out of homosexual desire and is punished with sterility, and identifies the Targum's unusual term for Potiphar's office, sapokleturia, as a Hebraized form of the Latin speculator — an imperial bodyguard-turned-executioner also found in Mark 6:27 and rabbinic literature. He suggests that the Targum's choice of this specifically Roman term reflects the trauma of Jewish captives, especially boys and young men, sold into sexual slavery throughout the Roman Empire after the wars with Rome, with Joseph's ordeal functioning as a coded prayer for their deliverance.

Spero asks how Moses could have written the Balaam narrative of Numbers 22-24, told entirely from Balak's point of view and never revealed to Moses by prophecy, and reads the story itself as a satire exposing the empty pretensions of pagan sorcery — Balaam's transparent haggling over fees, his terror at his donkey seeing what he cannot, and his eventual, genuine prophetic inspiration. He proposes that Moses learned the episode's details only later, from Phinehas, who could have heard Balaam boast of his encounter with Balak while visiting Midian shortly before Balaam's death (Num. 31:8), and that this explains the puzzling ve-hazar ('and he returned and wrote') of the Jerusalem Talmud's version of the Bava Batra tradition.

Keiter argues that the Torah deliberately links Pharaoh's enslavement of Israel with the Tower of Babel narrative through the shared formula 'Come, let us . . .' (havah n-) and the shared motif of brick and mortar, found nowhere else in the Torah. Both episodes, she contends, are really challenges to God's authority disguised as practical policy — the tower builders sought to make a name for themselves and defy dispersal, while Pharaoh, a would-be god himself, sought to disprove the superiority of Israel's God by crushing His people — and both rely on the willing dehumanization of individuals for a collective cause, a theme underscored by the pervasive namelessness running through both stories.