Vol. 42:2

Examining three recurring themes in Rabbi Ovadiah Sforno's Torah commentary — prophecy in a waking state, self-actualization, and repentance — this article asks which of Sforno's readings are grounded in the biblical text and which go beyond it. It argues that Sforno's emphasis on this-worldly spirituality and the actualization of human potential reflects both close textual analysis and the influence of his Renaissance Italian milieu, while his recurring insistence on repentance in narratives where the text gives no such indication may respond to the trauma of the Spanish Expulsion and the broader experience of exile.

A study of the sixteenth-century Polish exegete Eliezer Ashkenazi's unusual reading of the Tower of Babel narrative in his Sefer Ma'aseh Hashem, in which God's confusion of languages represents not a punishment but a deliberate introduction of religious pluralism — a diversity of belief that Ashkenazi sees as the necessary precondition for the free intellectual inquiry through which Abraham discovers religious truth. The article situates this reading in Ashkenazi's own historical moment, the fracturing of religious unity in Reformation-era Poland, and traces its possible afterlife in Abraham Joshua Heschel's twentieth-century writing on religious pluralism.

An examination of why biblical law permits servitude at all, given the Torah's overriding commitment to liberty. Surveying the laws of the Hebrew and Canaanite slave alongside comparative material from the Code of Hammurabi, ancient Athens, and Rome, the article argues that biblical servitude was a regulated, temporary alternative to beggary or imprisonment, hedged with humane protections, and that rabbinic tradition — from Maimonides' account of gradual moral reform to the Talmud's treatment of slaves as partial members of the covenant — reflects an underlying trajectory toward the institution's eventual abolition.

Moses tells Pharaoh only that the Israelites need a three-day journey into the wilderness to sacrifice, never that they intend to leave for good. Rejecting Ibn Ezra and Nahmanides' identification of this 'Three-Day Plan' with the theophany at Sinai — which took place months, not days, after the Exodus, and involved bulls and male leaders rather than the flock animals and whole families Moses described — the article argues that the plan was in fact realized in Egypt itself, through the first Passover, and that this realization also explains why Pharaoh only belatedly gives chase after the Israelites.

The second installment of a comparison between the Book of Jubilees and rabbinic Midrash, this time on the Noah narrative: who was the eldest of Noah's sons, the identity and naming of Noah's wife, the purpose of Noah's post-Flood sacrifice, the claim that Shavu'ot originated as a covenant renewal in Noah's time, the calendar dispute over when the Flood began, and the surprisingly sympathetic account of Noah's drunkenness after planting the vine. Throughout, the article shows how Jubilees consistently elevates Noah to heroic, quasi-priestly status in ways the rabbis pointedly declined to follow, preferring Abraham as the tradition's true founding role model.

An inquiry into why the seven psalms recited daily in the Shaharit liturgy — one per day of the week, a practice inherited from the Levitical choir of the Temple — were assigned to their particular days. The article surveys the classic rabbinic explanation linking each psalm to a day of Creation, the Zohar's alternative scheme mapping the psalms onto seven millennial world-ages, and a modern numerological theory, concluding that none of these explanations is fully persuasive and that the original rationale for the assignments was likely lost soon after the Temple's destruction.

A comparison of biblical tzara'at with Hansen's disease (modern medical leprosy), arguing that despite the traditional translation of tzara'at as 'leprosy,' the two conditions share only their visibility on the skin: the diagnosis, ritual treatment, and religious framing of tzara'at in Leviticus 13-14 mark it as a concern of sacred space, time, and status rather than a medical category. The article closes by drawing a broader parallel between the historical stigmatization of leprosy sufferers and the social exclusion faced by people with HIV/AIDS today, arguing that both call for empathy rather than isolation.

Rather than reading Moses's admission that he is 'not a man of words' as mere stammering, the article traces a consistent pattern of social withdrawal and inarticulateness across Moses's early life — his flight after killing the Egyptian taskmaster, his silence with Jethro's daughters, Jethro's giving him Zipporah rather than Moses taking her — and argues that God's insistence on sending him to Pharaoh despite this is itself the point: a reluctant, unpolished spokesman makes it unmistakable that the words he speaks are God's, not his own. On this reading, Moses's later fluency in pleading for Israel after the Golden Calf marks his successful retraining as 'a man of words,' which makes his subsequent regression — striking the rock instead of speaking to it — a disqualifying relapse into the man of action he had once been.

Rabbinic tradition holds that Isaac was a full-grown adult of thirty-seven at the Akedah, which raises a halakhic puzzle: later law entitles, and even obligates, a child to resist a parent who threatens his life under the law of the rodef (pursuer). Why, then, did Isaac offer no resistance? Drawing on the Minhat Hinnukh's linking of the Akedah to the law requiring obedience to a prophet's command to temporarily suspend a Torah prohibition, the article argues that Isaac's passivity is legally mandated rather than merely admirable, since Abraham, acting as a prophet, was owed the same obedience later given to Elijah on Mount Carmel.

A review of Ben Zion Katz's A Journey Through Torah: A Critique of the Documentary Hypothesis (Urim Publications, 2012), which confronts the Documentary Hypothesis directly rather than dismissing it as heresy, marshaling talmudic, medieval, and philosophical sources that already accept limited forms of textual emendation and post-Mosaic authorship to argue for a 'fragmentary hypothesis' — that Moses compiled the Torah's prehistory from older material and that non-legislative changes were later made by prophets — as a middle path between traditional faith and academic biblical criticism.