Vol. 42:1

Ibn Ezra stands almost alone among the classical commentators in noting that arummim ('naked,' Gen. 2:25) and arum ('cunning,' Gen. 3:1) play on the same root, a pun most traditional exegetes pass over in silence, perhaps wary of ascribing literary artifice to the Torah itself. Comparing this wordplay to similar puns in Judges and contrasting it with Targum Pseudo-Jonathan's attempt to neutralize it by rendering both words as 'wise,' the article argues that the pun functions primarily as an elegant narrative hinge linking the creation of Adam and Eve to the introduction of the serpent, rather than as a vehicle for any deeper theological lesson.

Why does Abraham repeatedly 'invoke the name of the Lord' at altars and a planted tamarisk, with no sacrifice ever mentioned? Reading the phrase va-yikra be-shem against Maimonides' account of Abraham's independently discovered monotheism and against other biblical uses of shem as 'proclamation' or 'renown,' the article argues that invoking the Lord's name was Abraham's way of publicly teaching his new theology to the idolaters around him — a missionary act that Isaac continued but that Jacob, already surrounded by his own large household, no longer needed to perform.

The Bible calls Athaliah both the daughter of Ahab and the daughter of Omri, and reconciling the two claims matters halakhically, since either reading implies that a Davidic king married his own aunt. Surveying rabbinic and modern academic attempts to resolve the contradiction — that 'daughter' can mean granddaughter, or that it can mean sister — the article shows that every solution requires treating some biblical verse about the royal marriages as non-literal, and traces how commentators from Kimhi to the Vilna Gaon worked around the resulting genealogical knot.

Yah, the short form of the Tetragrammaton first attested in the Song of the Sea, is far more widespread in the Hebrew Bible than most English translations let on — appearing alone dozens of times in Psalms, embedded in theophoric names from Elijah to Isaiah, and standing beside the full name YHVH in Isaiah and Psalms. Surveying how major English and Aramaic translations have obscured or transliterated Yah across the centuries, and distinguishing it from the notorious hybrid 'Jehovah,' the article argues that Yah is knowable, pronounceable, liturgically popular, and — unlike the Tetragrammaton itself — permissible to say aloud.

Jeremiah 26 records both Jeremiah's near-execution for prophesying the Temple's destruction and, almost as an aside, the actual killing of a lesser-known prophet, Uriah ben Shemaiah, who preached the same message and was extradited from Egypt and put to death by King Jehoiakim. Reading the chapter's shifting crowd sympathies, the elders' invocation of Micah's precedent under Hezekiah, and the narrative role of Ahikam ben Shaphan, the article argues that the Uriah episode was appended by Jeremiah's tradents specifically to underscore Jehoiakim's wickedness and to show how narrowly Jeremiah escaped Uriah's fate.

The Bible repeatedly identifies its heroes — Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, David — as shepherds, and the standard midrashic reading treats shepherding as leadership training. But that explanation cannot account for Abel, the Bible's first and least leaderly shepherd. Tracing the sacrificial logic back to Cain and Abel, the article argues that the Bible's real point in naming its heroes as shepherds is to mark them as capable of bringing the correct sacrifice to God — animal sacrifice having been validated as the proper mode of worship from the very first offering accepted in Genesis.

The standard reading of I Samuel 15 — that Saul was ordered to exterminate the Amalekites and failed only by sparing King Agag and the livestock — cannot explain why Agag's mother is later described as still capable of being bereaved, or why Amalekites reappear fighting David a dozen chapters later. Building a close reading around the biblical word am, which frequently denotes a military force rather than an entire people, the article argues that Saul actually killed only the Amalekite combatants and spared the non-combatants, and that his real sin, condemned by Samuel, was a different and narrower one: yielding to his troops' wish to keep the plunder.

Serah, daughter of Asher, appears in the Bible only in two genealogical lists centuries apart — yet rabbinic literature builds her into an immortal figure who reassures Jacob that Joseph is alive, authenticates Moses as redeemer, reveals the location of Joseph's sunken coffin, talks Joab out of destroying an entire city as the 'wise woman' of Abel Beth-maacah, and corrects a rabbi's teaching about the Red Sea centuries later still. The article traces this midrashic tradition across sources from Genesis Rabbah to the Zohar and to the historical veneration of Serah's tomb in Isfahan, arguing that she functions as a female counterpart to Elijah: a transtemporal bearer of hidden knowledge who links the patriarchal age to the redemption from Egypt and beyond.

Hannah's vow to raise Samuel as a Nazirite runs into a legal snag: Jewish law holds that only a father, not a mother, may consecrate a minor son as a Nazirite, yet the text never states that Elkanah did so — a difficulty Radak himself flagged without resolving. Drawing on a Talmudic rule that a husband who says 'Amen' to his wife's Nazirite vow thereby becomes a co-vower, the article proposes that Elkanah's reply in I Samuel 1:23, 'May the Lord fulfill His word,' is the missing prooftext that legally completes Samuel's consecration.

A review of Onkelos on the Torah: Understanding the Bible Text, the five-volume edition and translation by Israel Drazin and Stanley M. Wagner (Gefen, 2011) — the first full English rendering of Targum Onkelos. The review praises the set's elegant translation and extensive commentary while faulting its inconsistent Aramaic source text, its handling of the identity and dating of 'Onkelos,' and some missed opportunities to explore the ideological reasons behind the Targum's characteristic rewritings, such as its avoidance of anthropomorphism and its preference for the Tetragrammaton over Elohim.

A review of Uriel Simon's JPS Bible Commentary on Jonah (1999), which surveys and rejects the three traditional readings of the book's central theme — atonement versus repentance, universalism versus particularism, and prophecy realized versus prophecy complied with — in favor of a fourth: Jonah as a study of divine compassion caught between justice and mercy. The review credits Simon's densely argued introduction and close attention to irony while questioning whether his own thesis fully squares with his claim that Jonah shows no anguish over his unfulfilled prediction.

Responding to Min Suc Kee's earlier JBQ article arguing that the Hebrew word mayim ('water') owes its dual grammatical form to ancient Near Eastern creation myths in which the primordial waters were split into an upper and lower pair, Pinker counters that a word as basic as 'water' must predate any creation legend, not derive from one. He proposes instead that mayim descends from the onomatopoeic yam, echoing the sound of moving water, and that shamayim ('heaven') may be a contraction of sham mayim, 'where water was.'