Vol. 42:4

Genesis names Esau's wives twice, in chapter 26 and chapter 36, using two seemingly unrelated sets of names — a discrepancy traditional commentators have resolved in strikingly different ways. Surveying opinions from Rashi through Nahmanides to R. Abraham Maimuni, this article traces proposed solutions ranging from three identical wives known by alternate names to six entirely distinct women, weighing the textual and midrashic evidence each approach must reconcile.

The two bronze pillars, Jachin and Boaz, that stood before Solomon's Temple have long puzzled readers: what were they made of, what did their names mean, and did they serve a structural, ceremonial, or purely symbolic purpose? Drawing on ancient Near Eastern parallels, rabbinic commentary, and even Freemasonic legend, this article surveys the competing explanations for the pillars' material, names, function, and orientation, concluding that the questions have long outlasted any single answer.

Zucker and Reiss argue that Chronicles, writing for a demoralized post-exilic community without a king or full independence, downplays both the Mosaic Sinai covenant and the Davidic Zion covenant in favor of an implicit third covenant centered on the Jerusalem Temple and its Levitical personnel. Tracing how Chronicles sanitizes David into an idealized cult-founder who comes to eclipse Moses, they propose calling this synthesis a 'Levitical Covenant' — one that let the Chronicler's audience find religious meaning in Temple worship after the political covenants of Israel's past had failed to sustain them.

Reading against the common view that Genesis 37–50 is simply 'the story of Joseph,' Zhao argues that Judah, not Joseph, is its true developing hero. Tracing Judah's arc from his ambiguous departure from his brothers at the start of Genesis 38 through his self-sacrificing plea for Benjamin's release, the article contends that chapter 38's account of Judah's failure and repentance with Tamar is the narrative hinge that transforms him from a failed rescuer into the leader who ultimately reconciles the family and inherits Jacob's blessing.

Reading Psalm 63 against the physical realities of the Judean wilderness — thirst, sleeplessness, scarce food, prowling jackals — Prero, drawing on his own experience leading wilderness treks in the region, shows how David repeatedly redirects the language of physical deprivation into an expression of longing for God. The result is a portrait of a psalm whose central move is not complaint but the transformation of bodily suffering into praise.

Adler traces the aftermath of Gedaliah's assassination in Jeremiah 40–44 as a threefold catastrophe: a Jew's murder of a fellow Jew, the coerced flight of the remaining community — and the prophet Jeremiah — to Egypt against God's explicit word, and that community's subsequent relapse into idolatry there. Read together, he argues, these episodes amount to a bitter reversal of the Exodus, undoing in a few violent months what Moses and generations of prophets had achieved.

Bakon examines four Psalms passages that list 'those who fear the Lord' (yir'ei Hashem) alongside the houses of Israel, Aaron, and Levi, arguing — against readings that take the term to mean especially pious Israelites or proselytes — that it designates righteous gentiles who worshipped Israel's God without full conversion. Tracing figures such as Naaman and later Roman sympathizers such as Poppaea, he situates the phenomenon within a broader biblical and post-exilic invitation to the nations, one eventually curtailed by rabbinic restrictions on proselytizing and by Christianity's more welcoming missionary success.

Bar surveys the Bible's scattered references to a 'destroying angel' (malakh ha-mashhit) — at the threshing floor of Araunah, in the death of Egypt's firstborn, and possibly at Sennacherib's camp — alongside Mesopotamian myths of autonomous death-gods like Erra and Namtar. He argues that the Bible's angel, unlike its Near Eastern counterparts, is never independent: it acts strictly on God's command and can be halted by God's word alone, a distinction that consistently separates Israelite monotheism from the polytheistic frameworks it answers.

Meschel brings the science of metallurgy to bear on two biblical puzzles: when Israelites first mastered ironworking (later than their neighbors, she concludes, not securely attested until the age of Hezekiah), and how Moses could have 'burned' the Golden Calf into a powder that could be strewn on water. Reviewing chemical and archaeological evidence alongside classical and medieval commentators, she favors David Frankel's proposal that a scribal error swapped the description of the shattered stone tablets with that of the melted calf, since limestone dust — unlike gold dust — floats.

Adler reports on the fifty-first International Bible Contest for Jewish Youth, held on Israel's Independence Day 2014, in which Eitan Amos of Toronto became the first non-Israeli champion in at least two decades. The report covers the contest's format, its roster of dignitaries and judges, and the broader educational and diplomatic apparatus — from the Jewish Agency to the IDF Education Corps — that sustains the annual competition.