Vol. 44:3

Comparing Homer's Iliad and Odyssey with the biblical narratives of the Philistines, this article argues that shared motifs — an ox-goad as weapon, sumptuous cloth as economic stakes, thunder as divine intervention, single champion combat, and the stripping and beheading of a defeated foe's corpse — point to a genuine Aegean cultural background for the Philistines. It draws on archaeological evidence from Ashkelon, Mycenae, Enkomi, and Sardinia to argue that Goliath's armor and weaponry in particular reflect authentic Bronze Age Aegean material culture rather than local Canaanite conventions.

Examining the widespread belief that the Philistine idol Dagon was shaped like a mermaid, this article traces the fish identification back only as far as the Church Father Jerome, and shows that the classical Jewish sources — from Menachem Ben Saruk and Rabbenu Tam through Ralbag — largely reject or complicate it. It argues that the deity's more likely origin is the Semitic grain god Dagan, and that the case for a fish-shaped idol rests on little more than the resemblance between the words dag and Dagon.

Why is the book of Job, an individual tragedy, included among the texts permitted for study on the Ninth of Av alongside Lamentations and the sad portions of Jeremiah? Through close linguistic and structural comparison — the cursing of one's birth-day, the fantasy of a lawsuit against God, the shared setting in the land of Utz, and parallel structures of faith, complaint, and uncertain resolution — this article argues that Job gives voice to a kind of grief that personal repentance cannot: the sense that national suffering is simply unjust, even while faith in ultimate divine justice is preserved.

Why was the sign of Moses' hand becoming diseased and then healed the only one of the three signs given at the Burning Bush that was never displayed to the Egyptians? Drawing on Exodus Rabbah's reading of the sign as a rebuke for slander, and on the Egyptian historian Manetho's hostile account (preserved by Josephus) that identifies Moses with a leprous priest named Osarseph, this article argues that the sign was meant only for the Israelites themselves — a private assurance that, whatever status the Egyptians assigned them, they were pure and blameless.

Rabbinic chronology places Achashverosh's reign before the building of the Second Temple, while cuneiform evidence and Greek historians place Xerxes' reign after it — a discrepancy that colors several midrashim about Achashverosh's feast and his refusal to permit Temple construction. This article argues that these aggadic statements remain meaningful once reread against the historically correct setting: not as being about the Temple itself, which was already standing, but about the still-unwalled and unrebuilt city of Jerusalem, whose reconstruction Achashverosh's successors likewise resisted.

The Torah's prohibition against hybridizing animals, plants, and fibers (kilayim) receives no stated rationale, and the commentators disagree over whether it concerns idolatry, the integrity of creation, or sexual morality. This article follows the view of Maharal and Ibn Ezra that the prohibition hints at illicit sexual relations, and argues — through etymology, biblical parallels, and Bronze Age archaeological evidence for viticulture and grain cultivation in the southern Jordan Valley — that the specific choice of the vineyard and grain fields to represent this prohibition is best explained by their association with Sodom and Gomorrah, cities remembered for abundant wine and bread alongside notorious sexual sin.

Exodus 12:40 states plainly that Israel dwelt in Egypt for 430 years, yet the lifespans recorded for Kehath, Amram, and Moses leave room for only about 350 years, forcing the traditional rabbinic solution that counts the 430 (and 400) years from the Covenant of the Parts rather than from the descent to Egypt, yielding an actual sojourn of only 210 years. This article proposes instead reading Exodus 12:40 and Genesis 15 literally, and reinterprets the genealogical list in Genesis 46 as including grandchildren born both before and after the descent to Egypt, a solution the author argues is better supported by the text and resolves several difficulties in Genesis 38 and Numbers 26 as well.

Reading the Weekday Amidah as a rabbinic psalm, this article traces both its divergences from and convergences with the Book of Psalms — from the replacement of Temple sacrifice with verbal prayer and the shift from priestly performance to congregational participation, to direct quotations, shared theological epithets, and the psalmic device of parallelism. Applying Hermann Gunkel's form-critical categories of lament, hymn, thanksgiving, wisdom, and royal psalms to the Amidah's nineteen benedictions, it argues that the prayer's architects modeled their liturgy on cultic hymns even as they deliberately diverged from them to mark a break with the sacrificial Temple system.

Genesis describes Adam and Cain as tillers of the soil and Abel as a shepherd, and within only seven generations has Tubal-cain forging copper and iron implements — a level of technological development that, per the archaeological record of agriculture, animal domestication, and metallurgy, could not have existed before roughly 4500 BCE for copper and 1300 BCE for iron. Reading the genealogy of Genesis 4 as historically literal, this article argues that the first biblical family's described lifestyle fits a period around or after 1300 BCE, most likely during the time of the Judges rather than at the true dawn of the human species.