Vol. 43:4

The closing chapters of Ezekiel prescribe festival and daily sacrifices that diverge sharply from the parallel laws in Numbers and Exodus — in the animals required, the meal-to-animal ratios, and the accompanying libations. This article catalogues those discrepancies and surveys four traditions of resolving them: the Talmud's reading of Ezekiel as describing exigent circumstances, Radak's view that sacrificial law will simply change in the Messianic era, Maimonides' claim that Ezekiel describes one-time inaugural offerings governed by different rules, and the view of several commentators that Ezekiel's sacrifices are additions to, rather than replacements for, the Torah's own requirements.

The Book of Ruth opens with the words 'in the days when the judges judged,' explicitly locating itself in the lawless era chronicled at the end of Judges. This article traces a deliberate set of shared roots — shalaf, davak, lyn, yada, paga, and others — that Judges uses to narrate corruption (rape, theft, civil war) and that Ruth reuses to narrate virtue (loyalty, hospitality, redemption). Read together, the two books trace Israel's movement from a society that is superficially righteous but actually corrupt to one that learns to see past appearances — Ruth's foreignness included — and recognize goodness from within, culminating in the birth of King David.

Because the Books of Samuel present an idealized, pro-David narrative, the text nonetheless preserves an alternative storyline — retained, the author argues, out of respect for authoritative tradition — in which David actively works to unseat Saul rather than merely fleeing his jealousy. Tracing David's rise from court musician to army commander, his pact with Jonathan, his flight to Philistine Ziklag where he built an army explicitly said to march against Saul, and the chronological math of Ish-bosheth's two-year reign against David's seven-and-a-half years in Hebron, the article contends that David had likely already taken control of Judah years before Saul's death on Mount Gilboa.

The High Priest's breastplate held the Urim ve-Tummim, objects used to render divine decisions on communal matters, but the Bible never says what they actually were. This article surveys the major traditions — Ramban's view that they were divine names inscribed and consulted through a form of ru'ah ha-kodesh, Ibn Ezra's claim that they were crafted objects corresponding to astrological symbols, the view that they were simply the twelve breastplate stones, and Driver's proposal that they were sacred lots — and traces every explicit biblical mention of them, from the priestly garments through their apparent disuse after the era of David, Samuel, and Solomon and their hoped-for future reappearance in Ezra and Nehemiah.

The Masoretic Book of Esther is strikingly irreligious — God's name never appears, its heroes bear pagan names, and its Jews respond to crisis with fasting and mourning rather than prayer, in contrast to the more overtly pious Greek versions. The author argues that this is deliberate: the canonized Hebrew text depicts a assimilated Shushan community that nonetheless remains a target of Gentile hatred, and its hidden message is that concealing Jewish identity and abandoning observance does not purchase safety in the Diaspora, a lesson the author extends to nineteenth- and twentieth-century European Jewish assimilation and its failure to blunt antisemitism.

Judges 12:11-12 devotes just two terse verses to Elon the Zebulunite, a minor judge buried in a town called Aijalon that Joshua 19 assigns to the tribe of Dan, not Zebulun. Reading this apparent contradiction against the broader biblical record of Dan's failure to hold its southern allotment — most vividly dramatized in the isolation of Samson, a Danite fighting alone in Judah with no tribal army behind him — the author argues that Aijalon-Zebulun and Aijalon-Dan are the same city, peacefully absorbed by seafaring Zebulunites as Dan's population thinned and migrated north, and that the brief notice of Elon's judgeship and burial there preserves a otherwise unrecorded chapter of Israel's shifting tribal borders.

Against William Propp's argument that a fragment of an independent Priestly source can be excavated intact from Ezekiel 20, this article revives and extends M. Burrows's older claim that Ezekiel already knew the composite Pentateuch as we have it — pointing to Ezekiel 27's mixture of P and J nations from Genesis 10, and to parallels between Ezekiel 8:4 and Exodus 24. It then makes a parallel case for Psalm 106, tracing a sequence of verbal parallels — most tellingly its retelling of the Baal Peor incident, which follows Numbers 25 in order through both its J and P material — to argue that the Psalmist, too, knew the Torah's sources already combined.

A first-person report on the 52nd annual Hidon ha-Tanakh, held in Jerusalem on Israel Independence Day with 76 contestants from 33 countries plus 4 Israeli finalists. The theme was the ingathering of the exiles, reflected in Prime Minister Netanyahu's questions to the finalists; Eyal Matas of Rehovot defeated Yisrael Elgrabi of Jerusalem in the deciding round, the first solo Israeli win in several years. The report also notes the guest appearance of Bat Galim Shaar, mother of the murdered Gilad Shaar, and remarks by Knesset speaker Yuli Edelstein and Jewish Agency chairman Natan Sharansky.

A review of I Kings – Torn in Two by Alex Israel (Maggid Books, 2013), part of the Maggid Studies in Tanakh series, praising its chapter-by-chapter treatment of national unity, prophecy, monarchy, and the Temple and its combination of rabbinic and academic sources. The reviewer highlights the book's reading of the prophet-from-Judah episode in chapter 13 and its analysis of Ahab's political calculations in chapter 20, while noting a few factual slips and a missed opportunity to flag its excellent back-of-book study questions earlier in the text.

A review of the three-volume Outside the Bible: Ancient Writings Related to Scripture (Feldman, Kugel and Schiffman, eds.; JPS/University of Nebraska, 2013), an anthology of Dead Sea Scrolls material, Philo, Josephus, and Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha spanning from the end of the Babylonian Exile to the second century CE. The reviewer highlights its introductory essays on the Septuagint and on Philo and Josephus, its mix of republished and newly commissioned translations, and its value both to scholars and to general readers seeking to fill the literary gap between the Hebrew Bible and the Mishnah.

A review of Old Testament Pseudepigrapha: More Noncanonical Scriptures, Volume 1 (Bauckham, Davila and Panayotov, eds.; Eerdmans, 2013), a supplement to Charlesworth's classic two-volume Old Testament Pseudepigrapha that adds newly discovered material and texts through the early seventh century CE. The reviewer highlights the Balaam Text from Tell Deir 'Alla — the only pre-exilic extra-biblical document naming a figure from the Torah — and the Legend of Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi, and notes that the volume increasingly blurs the line between pseudepigraphic and early midrashic literature.