Vol. 42:3
Rashi distinguishes in his Torah commentary between peshat, the plain sense of the text, and derash, midrashic elaboration that he includes only when he judges it to have some basis in the text itself. This article argues that three of Rashi's seemingly imaginative midrashic comments — linking Sarah's death to the Akedah, comparing the Promised Land favorably to Egypt, and singling out Amalek for total obliteration — are in fact supported by textual evidence beyond the specific verses where Rashi cites them, including narrative juxtaposition, patterns of word choice, and analogous usages elsewhere in the Torah. In the Amalek case, the author proposes that Rashi's inclusion of an otherwise fanciful rabbinic reading involving sexual violation is triggered by the Torah's exceptional use of the term zekher, ordinarily reserved for God, the righteous, and Israel, rather than the generic shem used for other enemies — an anomaly that echoes the term's association with mishkav zakhar. The study thus reframes derash not as free invention but as a mode of exegesis anchored, however subtly, in the biblical text.
Reassessing Solomon's reputation as a sage and poet, this article argues that his most consequential achievement was diplomatic and economic: leveraging the territorial gains of David's reign and a rare interval of peace, Solomon built commercial partnerships — chief among them with Hiram of Tyre — that gave Israel access to Phoenician maritime expertise and made Ezion-geber a hub of copper refining and Red Sea trade. Drawing on the biblical text alongside archaeological and Near Eastern comparative evidence, the author reconstructs the economic logic behind episodes such as the Queen of Sheba's visit, reading it as a high-stakes trade negotiation prompted by Israelite inroads into Arabian caravan routes rather than mere curiosity about Solomon's wisdom. The article also traces how Solomon's building programs, foreign marriages, and tax burdens, while diplomatically and economically astute in the short term, sowed the resentment that fractured the kingdom after his death.
Reading rabbinic and midrashic treatments of Psalm 6 and Psalm 20 against their plain sense, this article argues that the Sages were not attempting to explain these psalms' original meaning but used them as a springboard, an asmakhta, for teaching independent theological lessons. The Talmud's association of Psalm 6's superscription with circumcision, and Midrash Tehillim's linking of Psalm 20 — a martial psalm — to a woman in labor, both illustrate how midrashic exegesis freely detaches itself from a text's peshat in service of its didactic aims. Engaging literary theorist Wolfgang Iser's account of the limits a text imposes on its readers, the article contends that Midrash operates by a different logic, one unconstrained by such limits.
Continuing a series comparing the Book of Jubilees to later rabbinic midrash, this installment examines how Jubilees handles the Tower of Babel narrative and its surrounding material in Genesis 10-11. It argues that Jubilees' account of the earth's secret division among Noah's sons — and its explanation that Peleg was named for that division rather than for a future dispersal — could not be absorbed into rabbinic literature because it conflicts with the dominant rabbinic view that all humanity took part in building the tower and was later scattered. But other elements original to Jubilees, including the idea that the tower's builders sought to storm heaven and that Canaan wrongfully seized land allotted to Shem, reappear largely intact in the Talmud and later Midrash, since neither raised any theological difficulty for the Sages.
Examining the recurring biblical phrase re'ah niho'ah — God's "pleasing odor" from sacrifice — this article moves past the classical reading of the phrase as a mere metaphor for divine acceptance and argues, drawing on Talmudic sources (TB Zevahim 46b, TB Berakhot 43b), that the sacrificial smell describes an actual spiritual exchange: the nefesh (life-force) carried in the blood rises to God as scent (re'ah) in return for the ru'ah (spirit or inspiration) God bestows. This etymological pairing of re'ah and ru'ah also explains how a bloodless grain offering (minhah), brought by the poor in place of an animal's blood, can likewise produce a re'ah niho'ah, and why incense — the most "non-physical" of all sacrifices — held such a central role in the Yom Kippur service. The article closes by suggesting that after the Temple's destruction, prayer inherited this function, becoming the means by which a worshiper's own nefesh reaches God.
Bakon traces how the Sages of the Talmud, faced with a Torah that mandates the death penalty for numerous crimes, effectively neutralized its application while formally leaving it "on the books." He argues that this restraint follows from principles embedded in the Written Law itself — the sanctity of man created in God's image, the infinite worth of a single life, and above all the two-witness requirement, whose corollaries (the exclusion of circumstantial evidence and the ban on self-incrimination) made conviction for a capital crime nearly impossible. The article surveys supporting cases, from the false testimony against Naboth to R. Simeon ben Shetah's refusal to convict a man he had all but seen commit murder, and closes by praising the State of Israel for perpetuating this rabbinic tradition of retaining capital punishment in law while almost never carrying it out.
Hayyim Angel reads two of Genesis’s strangest images — the talking snake of Eden and the nocturnal being who wrestles with Jacob at the Jabbok — as deliberately demythologized figures for inward psychological struggle rather than as literal supernatural beings. Drawing on the Zohar, Radak, Sforno, and Cassuto’s wordplay on Eve’s name, he argues the snake personifies Eve’s own temptation, which becomes internalized as part of her nature once she sins; drawing on midrashic identifications of Jacob’s opponent as either Esau’s guardian angel or Jacob’s own deceitful self, he argues the wrestling match dramatizes Jacob’s need to confront both his brother and his history of deception. Unlike Adam and Eve, who deflect blame and are banished, Jacob takes ownership of the struggle and is renamed Israel — though the Bible’s continued use of both names, and later prophetic wordplay on ya’akov/akov (deceit), shows that becoming Israel is a lifelong process rather than a completed transformation.
Traces how hope for a restored Davidic monarchy, confidently proclaimed by Jeremiah and Ezekiel, is progressively muted across the Exilic and post-Exilic corpus. Second Isaiah transfers the language of divine appointment to Cyrus; Haggai and Zechariah hint at Zerubbabel's Davidic descent without naming it outright; and Ezra-Nehemiah, Chronicles, and Daniel largely omit the subject altogether. The authors argue this trajectory reflects a shrewd political calculation by Judean writers operating under Persian and later Hellenistic rule, for whom open talk of a restored native king could be read as sedition.
A firsthand report on the Third Adult Bible Contest, held in December 2013 at Jerusalem's Binyanei Ha-Umah and broadcast on Israeli television, describing the event's sponsors, format, and winners. The report also previews plans to reopen the contest to international, non-Israeli contestants beginning Hanukkah 2014, reviving the International Adult Bible Contest after roughly fifty years.
A review of Joel S. Baden's The Composition of the Pentateuch: Renewing the Documentary Hypothesis (Yale University Press, 2012), which refashions the classical documentary hypothesis as a purely literary argument resting on a single, minimally-creative compiler. The review credits Baden's case studies with real analytical skill but argues, through a series of specific textual counter-examples in Exodus, Numbers, and the Joseph and Sinai narratives, that many of his source divisions create as many literary problems as they resolve and that his claim that D never draws on P has real exceptions.
A review of A New English Translation of the Septuagint (NETS), edited by Albert Pietersma and Benjamin G. Wright (Oxford University Press, 2007) — the first full English rendering of the LXX since 1851. The review welcomes its thorough introductions and side-by-side treatment of double Greek versions, but notes that NETS is not a fresh translation from the Greek so much as a modified NRSV, and questions why the editors did not instead adapt the JPS Tanakh translation for a Jewish readership.
Two letters respond to earlier JBQ articles. Malcolm E. Schrader challenges a 2012 study of biblical war curses for equating scriptural 'defeat in war' with the death of individual combatants, arguing the Bible instead treats defeat as national punishment for collective sin, with individual deaths as an incidental consequence. Aron Pinker rebuts a proposed emendation of the hapax legomenon keseh in Psalm 81:4 to kesef ('silver trumpets'), marshaling orthographic, versional, and lexical evidence that the received text should stand.