Vol. 44:2

This article surveys the long-running Jewish exegetical debate over whether the Bible's heroes may be judged 'at eye-level' or must be viewed as superior beings beyond criticism, tracing the tension from Talmudic disputes over Reuben and Bilhah through Ramban's willingness to fault Abraham and Jacob's sons, to Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch's view that Scripture's candor about the patriarchs' failings is what lends it credibility. It shows how later authorities, including Radak, R. Yosef Bekhor Shor, and the Zohar-influenced 'superior-being' school, divided over whether unstated biblical silence implies approval or an invitation to independent moral judgment. The author concludes that Hirsch charts a middle path: criticism is warranted when Scripture itself voices it, but where the text is silent, one should first seek to justify the patriarchs' conduct before resorting to censure.

Angel examines the tension between Nathan's prophecy in II Samuel 7, which promises David's dynasty eternal rule despite the sins of individual kings, and passages in Kings that make the monarchy's endurance conditional on faithfulness to the Torah. Surveying Psalm 89's anguished protest at the covenant's apparent abrogation and Jeremiah 33's reinterpretation of the covenant as eternal even through a lapse in the monarchy, the article traces how Zechariah and Chronicles carried Jeremiah's resolution forward. It further roots the divergent readings in the ambiguity of Jacob's blessing to Judah in Genesis 49:10, and distinguishes Psalm 89's immediate human reaction to catastrophe from Jeremiah's longer-term prophetic perspective.

Apple investigates the disputed etymology of Issakhar, the ninth son of Jacob, arguing that the key to unlocking his name lies in the root s-kh-r ('reward' or 'hire'), which threads through both the Zilpah and mandrake episodes in Leah's account of his birth. Weighing rival theories — an Egyptian deity Seker/Sokar, an Amorite cognate, and the rabbinic 'yesh sakhar' reading — he argues for a preferred derivation from ish sakhar ('a man who is a reward'), with the initial aleph eliding and the medial shin merging into the following sin. The article closes by surveying the divergent customs for pronouncing the name — Yissakhar versus Yissas'khar — across different Jewish communities.

Green reappraises the standard rabbinic caricature of Jeroboam ben Nebat as an archetypal villain, arguing that his early career — rising from an orphaned commoner to leader of a revolt against Solomon's oppressive labor and tax policies — casts him instead as a 'second Moses' who liberated Israel from Solomon's corvee. Drawing on Josephus and a set of literary parallels between the Exodus and Jeroboam narratives, the article credits him with genuine constructive leadership before turning to his sins: the golden calves at Bethel and Dan, the ousting of the Levitical priesthood, and the recalendaring of Sukkot. Weighing scholarly views from Graetz, Buber, and Albright that the calves represented an invisible God rather than an idol, Green concludes that Jeroboam's religious missteps, though real, should not erase his earlier record as a positive and constructive leader.

Responding to widely publicized 2014 media claims that carbon-dating of camel bones in the Aravah Valley proves camels are 'anachronistic' in Genesis, Landa argues that the domestication of the dromedary was a centuries-long transition during which camels remained rare, expensive possessions of the wealthy and powerful — exactly the pattern the patriarchal narratives display, from Abraham's camels (a gift from Pharaoh) to their conspicuous absence from Isaac, Jacob's early years, and the donkey-borne journeys of Joseph's brothers to Egypt. He contends that the text's precise placement of camels only where wealth and geography would predict them, and their equally precise absence in contexts where later 'anachronistic' insertion would be expected, is evidence the narratives were recorded close to the events they describe rather than invented or edited centuries later.

Greenberger offers a close psychological reading of Genesis 4, arguing that Cain's rejected offering — following a childhood in which he was favored as firstborn and partner in tilling the soil — exposed an inflated, extrinsically-based self-worth that collapsed the moment it was challenged. She traces God's response to Cain not as reproach but as a preventative, empathetic intervention urging him toward self-improvement rather than rivalry with Abel, and reads Cain's murder of his brother as the tragic result of his refusal to accept that path. The article closes by drawing out universal implications: rejection and defeat are unavoidable features of the human condition, and society's rehabilitative response to wrongdoing — exemplified in Cain's mark, exile, and fathering of Hanoch — models how individuals can be held accountable while still being offered a route back to self-worth.

Klein resolves an apparent contradiction between Numbers 21, which describes the territory between the Arnon and Jabbok rivers as originally Moabite land conquered by Sihon the Amorite, and Judges 11, where the king of Ammon claims that same territory as historically Ammonite. Surveying talmudic and medieval sources — Rashi, Nahmanides, R. Meyuhas b. Eliyahu, R. Hayyim Paltiel, and Raabad — he shows several proposed reconciliations, from the view that Sihon conquered land from both nations to the claim that Ammon and Moab, as brother nations descended from Lot, shared a single king and were sometimes treated as a single political entity in the biblical text. The article closes by tracing rabbinic traditions that identify the Moabite idol Chemosh with the pre-Islamic cult object at the site later occupied by the Kaaba in Mecca, and how its worship may have spread from Moab to Ammon.