Vol. 43:2

Reading four seemingly unrelated legal passages together — the prohibition of a fruit tree's first three years of produce (orlah), the ban on destroying fruit trees in wartime, the law of accidental manslaughter with an axe, and the requirement to bury an executed criminal's body before nightfall — this article argues that the Bible repeatedly stages man and tree as mirror images of one another. Where the tree's fruit is withheld from human ownership and the tree itself is protected from man's blade, man's own body is marked by a single sanctioned cut (circumcision) and is otherwise protected from mutilation; the pairing of these commandments expresses a shared theology in which neither the fruit of one's labor nor one's own body and land are fully one's own, but partnered with God.

The first installment of a two-part study, this article sets the historical stage for Sennacherib's siege of Jerusalem by profiling the Assyrian high officials — the Tartan, the Rabsaris, and the Rabshakeh — who confronted Hezekiah's envoys, and by comparing the biblical narrative of II Kings 18-19 and Isaiah 36-37 with Sennacherib's own Annals, inscribed on the Taylor, Oriental Institute, and Jerusalem Prisms. It shows that the Assyrian record corroborates the siege and the tribute Hezekiah was forced to pay, while diverging from and exaggerating other details, and surveys the deliberate terror tactics — mass impalement, deportation, and boastful atrocity narrative — through which Assyrian kings sought to browbeat their opponents into surrender.

Deuteronomy 23:4-5 bars Ammonites and Moabites from the assembly of Israel because they failed to meet the Israelites with bread and water in the wilderness, yet Deuteronomy 2:28-29 has Moses recall both the Edomites and the Moabites selling the Israelites food and water — an apparent contradiction that generations of medieval commentators tried to resolve. This article surveys the major approaches, from Rashi's and Ibn Ezra's attempts to distinguish selling from granting passage, to Rashbam's and the Meiri's geographic solution limiting the sale to the Moabites of Ar, to Nahmanides' claim that the two nations were condemned for two distinct sins, testing each against the wording of Nehemiah 13:1-2 and rabbinic sources such as TB Yevamot 76b-77a and TB Sanhedrin 103b.

Jonadab appears twice in the story of Amnon's rape of Tamar and its bloody aftermath (II Samuel 13): first advising Amnon on how to lure Tamar to his bed, and later coolly informing David that only Amnon, not all his sons, has been killed. This article weighs the two main readings of Jonadab offered by the commentators — the minority view that he was a well-meaning but naive friend who never anticipated the rape, against the majority view (Rashi, Radak, Ralbag) that he was a scheming Iago-like courtier who used the crime to engineer the elimination of David's unfit heir — and argues that Jonadab's silence about Absalom's murder plot and his eagerness to have his own report verified by the king expose him as never having been Amnon's true friend.

The Red Heifer ritual of Numbers 19 has long resisted rational explanation, both because of the ash's paradoxical power to purify the impure while defiling the pure, and because the Talmud itself classifies it as a hok beyond reason. Building on Rashi's citation of Rabbi Moshe ha-Darshan, who reads the ritual as atonement for the Golden Calf, this article connects the red cow to the Egyptian cow-goddess Hathor and argues that the burning of the heifer, and even the burning of a crimson thread in the ritual, symbolically reenacts and negates the destruction of that idol, offering a fresh account of why contact with the ashes both purifies and defiles.

Leviticus 23:40 never names the etrog, calling instead for the ambiguous "fruit of goodly trees," and the word etrog appears nowhere in the Bible; yet by the first century CE, Targum Onkelos and Josephus both identify the citron as one of Sukkot's Four Species. Combining textual analysis of Leviticus and Nehemiah 8 with the botanical history of citrus and a 2012 pollen discovery at the royal garden of Ramat Rahel, this article argues that the citron was unknown in the biblical Land of Israel and only arrived from Persia during or after the Second Temple period, so that its identification with the "goodly fruit" of Leviticus was a later, exegetical innovation rather than an unbroken tradition reaching back to Sinai.

When Genesis 21:1 says that God pakad Sarah, most classical commentators reject Nahmanides' rendering "remembered" in favor of a meaning tied to the healing of her infertility, with Pa'ane'ah Raza and Hayyim Paltiel linking the verb to the talmudic phrase for the return of the menstrual cycle. Building on his own earlier reading of akarah in Genesis 11:30 as an "unattached follicle," the author proposes that pakad is the semantic opposite of ne'ekar ("detached") and, following a suggestion of Samson Raphael Hirsch linking pakad to beged (a garment), argues that the term describes the reattachment or fixation of Sarah's previously unattached follicle.

The three-verse exchange in Ezra 4:1-3, in which the Samaritans offer to help build the Second Temple and are rebuffed by Zerubbabel and Jeshua, is read here as a dense text encoding the deeper dispute over Israelite identity. The article traces why the high priest Jeshua joins a response to an offer addressed only to political leaders, what the enigmatic phrase "we ourselves together will build" is meant to exclude, why the narrator calls the Samaritans "adversaries of Judah" before they have done anything hostile, and how the keri/ketiv variant on "we sacrifice unto Him [lo]" quietly discredits the Samaritans' claim to worship the same God — cumulatively making the case that the passage became the proof text for excluding gentiles from obligatory Temple contributions.

Deuteronomy commands that the blessing be pronounced at Mount Gerizim and the curse at Mount Ebal, but never explains the choice. After surveying Ramban's directional symbolism and the long-repeated but topographically false claim (traced to Benjamin of Tudela) that Gerizim is lush while Ebal is barren, this article proposes instead that Gerizim's abundant springs — which watered Shechem and its valley for generations — are the real basis for the choice, reinforced by the shared b-r-kh root linking berakhah (blessing) and berekhah (pool), and by the Torah's own requirement that the inscribed stones be plastered, which only makes sense in a dry climate.

Balaam's oracle that Israel is "a people that shall dwell alone" (Num. 23:9) reads as a curse to modern ears attuned to the interdependence of nations, yet the biblical and rabbinic tradition (Rashi, Deut. 23:6) insists it was meant as a blessing. This article works through several senses in which the verse can be read positively — Israel's historical indestructibility, its distinctiveness as a people set apart in law and custom, and, drawing on Adrian Hastings' thesis that biblical Israel is the prototype of the modern nation-state, its claim to be the first true "nation" rather than a mere ethnicity — before closing with Rav Soloveitchik's distinction between being alone and being lonely as a possible key to Balaam's oracle.

A review of Ezra and the Law in History and Tradition by Lisbeth S. Fried (University of South Carolina Press, 2014), part of the Studies on Personalities of the Old Testament series. The review highlights the book's survey of how Ezra is portrayed beyond the biblical text — in the Apocrypha and in Christian, Muslim, and Samaritan literature, including the Fourth Ezra tradition that he prophetically re-dictated a burned Torah — and singles out its critique of Peter Frei's theory of Persian imperial authorization of local law as a particularly forceful piece of the book's argument against the Documentary Hypothesis's account of Ezra.

A review of Recalling the Covenant: A Contemporary Commentary on the Five Books of the Torah by Moshe Shammah (KTAV, 2011), an Orthodox peshat commentary that combines fidelity to the Masoretic Text with modern biblical scholarship and ancient Near Eastern comparison. The review highlights Shammah's readings of the Tower of Babel as literary parody, of Cain and Abel as allegory, and of the Torah's laws of adultery and the captive "beautiful woman" against their ancient Near Eastern counterparts, as well as his teacher Rabbi Solomon D. Sassoon's view that biblical numbers are frequently symbolic rather than literal.