Vol. 43:3

A memorial tribute to Dan Vogel, longtime contributor and associate editor of the Jewish Bible Quarterly, who died in 2015. It traces his path from a Jersey City childhood through a career as professor of English at Yeshiva College and Stern College, his aliyah in 1973 and subsequent professorship at Michlalah-Jerusalem College for Women, and his prolific output of JBQ articles and book reviews that drew on world literature — from Melville to Milton — to illuminate biblical texts.

Bar surveys how the Hebrew Bible uses the term she'ol, weighing the scholarly debate over whether it denotes an actual grave, the netherworld, or both. Drawing on Ezekiel, Isaiah, Job, and the Psalms, he argues that Sheol most often signifies a "bad death" — premature, violent, or divinely punitive — rather than a destination reserved strictly for the wicked or shared by all the dead. He closes by tracing how later rabbinic sources, and Proverbs 15:24 in particular, began to separate the fates of the righteous and the wicked in ways foreign to the plain sense of the biblical text.

Moskowitz examines the enigmatic judge Ibzan, whose three-verse biography (Judg. 12:8-10) omits his tribal affiliation, and argues against the rabbinic identification of Ibzan with Boaz of Bethlehem-Judah. Marshaling both a peshat argument from the geographic clustering of northern judges and a derash argument built on wordplay linking Zebulun's name and Bethlehem's etymology to the theme of "dwelling," he contends that Ibzan in fact hailed from the northern Bethlehem in the territory of Zebulun.

Spero addresses the apparent redundancy of Exodus chapter 6, arguing that its five divine speeches to Moses are not a repetitive rehash but a deliberate strategic reset after the crisis of chapter 5. He shows how God's instructions clarify a division of labor between Moses and Aaron — Aaron to win back the disillusioned Israelites, Moses to serve as a divine mouthpiece before Pharaoh — and reads the inserted genealogy of Exodus 6:14-25 as an answer to lingering doubts about Moses' and Aaron's legitimacy as leaders.

Continuing his study of Sennacherib's siege of Jerusalem, Sivan focuses on the Rabshakeh, the Assyrian officer who delivers a fluent Hebrew propaganda harangue to the besieged city. Drawing on Assyriological research by Hayim Tadmor and others, he weighs several theories of the Rabshakeh's puzzling command of Hebrew and knowledge of Judean religion — that he was a renegade Israelite, a bilingual court scribe, or an officer who served among exiled Israelites — before tracing the episode's resolution in the destruction of the Assyrian army and Sennacherib's own assassination, and its afterlife in Western literature from Byron to a 2004 novelette.

Gevaryahu investigates the philological puzzle of Genesis 8:11, where the dove is grammatically female throughout the verse except for the anomalous masculine form of taraf ("plucked"). Surveying Rashi, the Targumim, Ibn Ezra, and modern Hebrew lexicography, he argues that taraf is best read as a noun denoting the flat blade of the leaf rather than a verb describing the dove's action. He traces how the Septuagint and Vulgate's rendering of the word as "twig" — a reading not found in Jewish sources — gave rise to the familiar Western image of the dove bearing an olive branch of peace, when in the Jewish tradition the leaf instead signals a new beginning after the Flood.

Novak traces the six-century conflict between Israel and the Philistines, from their possible early appearance among the Patriarchs through the Late Bronze Age Sea Peoples' invasion, the defeat at Aphek and loss of the Ark, the wars of Saul, David, and Hezekiah, and the prophetic denunciations of Isaiah, Amos, Jeremiah, and Zephaniah. He closes by considering how the Philistines, though extinct as a distinct people by the fifth century BCE, left their name attached to the land of Israel itself through the Roman renaming of Judea as Palestina.

Hidary reads Jacob's stop at Succoth (Gen. 33:17) as the deliberate conclusion of a long process of atonement that began with his deceiving Isaac and Esau. Tracing verbal and thematic echoes between the reconciliation scene with Esau and the original blessing-theft — the language of servant and lord, the repeated verb "approach," the gifts of goats and bread — she argues that Jacob's reunion with his brother functions as a personal Day of Atonement, of which the sukkot he then builds are the culminating gesture, prefiguring the later historical sequence from Yom Kippur to the festival of Sukkot.

Birnbaum catalogs the Bible's political assassinations of Israelite and Judean rulers, tallying roughly a third of the forty-four monarchs of the united and divided monarchies as victims of murder, and finds regicide markedly more frequent in the Northern Kingdom than in Judah. He attributes the gap partly to reverence for the Davidic line and partly to pointed anti-assassination messages he finds embedded in the Books of Samuel, especially David's repeated condemnations of those who killed Saul, Abner, and Ish-bosheth. He closes by citing survey evidence that most Israeli Jews today are unaware how common the phenomenon actually was.

Apple examines the notoriously difficult phrase arami oved avi in the Deuteronomy 26 first-fruits declaration, contrasting the peshat reading — "my father [Jacob] was a wandering Aramean" — with the Passover Haggadah's derash, which recasts the Aramean as Laban plotting to destroy Jacob's family. He surveys the grammatical debate over the verb oved between Rashi, Ibn Ezra, and the Maharal, and suggests, following Louis Finkelstein, that the midrash's demonization of Laban over Pharaoh may reflect later political sympathies between Ptolemaic Egypt and Seleucid Aram rather than the verse's original agricultural context.