Vol. 43:1

A close reading of the midrashic and classical commentary tradition surrounding Rachel — from her complicity in the substitution of Leah on her wedding night, through her demand for children and her theft of Laban's terafim, to the naming of her sons — argues that Rachel's growth from self-interested entitlement toward genuine hesed is tracked by the Torah's alternation between the divine names Elokim and Hashem. Rachel earns the title 'Mother of Israel' not by suppressing self-interest but by learning to hold it together with an undiluted capacity for hesed.

The Book of Judges devotes only two terse verses to Tola, Israel's seventh judge, in sharp contrast to the extended account of Abimelech's violent reign that precedes it. Reading the names in Tola's genealogy — Tola, Puah, Dodo, and his home at Shamir — against the tribal blessings given to Issachar, this article reconstructs a hypothetical portrait of Tola's twenty-three-year judgeship as an idyllic period of scholarship, domestic calm, and peace, won through the classical method of midreshei shemot, homiletical name-interpretation.

Psalms 106 and 114 personify the sea at the Splitting of the Sea of Reeds — rebuked in one psalm, fleeing in fright in the other — in ways the Exodus narrative itself never states. Tracing rabbinic identification of the sea with the angel Rahab, and reading a series of midrashim that reconcile the Exodus and Psalms accounts, this article reconstructs a fuller mythological backstory: a haughty or overzealous angel of the sea who defies Moses and is subdued by God, teaching that the Lord tolerates no rival power, however loyal, interfering with His plan for Israel.

The hapax legomenon la-su'ah ba-sadeh (Gen. 24:63), describing what Isaac was doing just before he first saw Rebekah, has been read by the classical commentators as prayer, as agricultural planting, and as taking a leisurely stroll. This article surveys the three traditions and argues that each yields a markedly different first impression of Isaac's character — as a holy ascetic emulating Abraham, as a settled farmer breaking from the patriarchal pattern of nomadism, or as a man capable of simple enjoyment — and that this ambiguity itself shaped how later readers understood Rebekah's entry into his life.

Tracing the major image-systems of the Book of Jeremiah — water, bride and harlot, father, and ritual — against the political and agricultural insecurity of late-monarchic Judah, and then following the shift to imagery of face, bone, light, and redemption across the three literary divisions of the apocryphal Book of Baruch, this article argues that Judean imagery moves in a clear arc: from pre-exilic insecurity and idolatry, through exilic despair and repentance, to the religious reconstruction and eventual joyous optimism that greeted Cyrus's decree.

Tracing the Egyptian title per-o ('great house') from its earliest use for the royal administration around 2500 BCE to its New Kingdom shift toward designating the king himself, this brief note argues that the Bible's own usage of 'Pharaoh' — untitled in Genesis and Exodus, later paired with a personal name from Pharaoh Neco and Pharaoh Hophra onward — mirrors this Egyptian development, and that the term's appearance in the patriarchal narratives is an anachronism reflecting the audience's own time rather than a historical marker.

The extraordinary ages recorded for Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, and Jacob become far more credible, this article proposes, if the word shanah once denoted a six-month season rather than a full twelve-month year — so that a stated 'year' of age in Genesis actually represents half that span. Drawing on the Bible's competing spring and autumn calendars, on other biblical words like yom that carry both a broad and a narrow sense, and on the either/or seasonal pairings in Genesis 8:22 and Psalm 74:17, the theory recasts Abraham's migration, the Patriarchs' fertility, and their reported lifespans into numbers consistent with ordinary human experience.

Norm Habel's influential six-part model of the biblical call narrative — divine confrontation, introductory word, commission, objection, reassurance, and sign — fits Gideon's call cleanly, but this article shows that the callings of Samuel and Elisha depart from the pattern in instructive ways. Samuel's call comes through a mistaken human voice and gradual recognition rather than direct confrontation, while Elisha's call arrives through Elijah's mantle and is answered with gestures rather than words. The variety of forms undermines any single template for how the Bible depicts a divine summons to service.

When Jacob learns that Joseph is alive, the Torah says va-yafog libbo, a phrase JPS renders 'his heart fainted' and NJPS 'his heart went numb.' Surveying commentators from Rashi and Rambam's metaphorical reading of a departed and returning divine spirit to Ibn Ezra, Sforno, and Samson Raphael Hirsch's more literal 'heart stopped,' this note argues, on the linguistic evidence of Brown-Driver-Briggs and the medical readings of Rambam and Ramban, that the phrase describes a genuine cardiac event brought on by sudden joy.

A review of From Gods to God: How the Bible Debunked, Suppressed, or Changed Ancient Myths and Legends by Avigdor Shinan and Meir Zakovitch (JPS, 2012), which argues that biblical writers fixed competing oral traditions in writing to suppress rival versions of Israel's foundational stories, leaving detectable traces that rabbinic literature sometimes independently recovers. The review credits the book's engaging, example-driven method while questioning whether it adequately defends its core assumption that oral traditions were both immutable enough to leave visible remnants and pliable enough to be substantially rewritten. Also briefly noted: James L. Crenshaw's Qoheleth: The Ironic Wink, Larry Tabick's The Aura of Torah, and Zev Bar Eitan's Abravanel's World of Torah on Genesis.

A review of the third edition of Women's Bible Commentary (Carol A. Newsom, Sharon H. Ringe, and Jacqueline E. Lapsley, eds.; Westminster John Knox, 2012), a 50-percent-expanded update of the pioneering 1990s feminist commentary. The review surveys its book-by-book structure, its special articles on figures like Eve, Sarah and Hagar, and Miriam, and its chapter on 'When Women Interpret the Bible,' which addresses the Bible's ambivalent authority for women readers and the challenge of gendered language for both humanity and God.