Vol. 44:4
Noah is commanded, both directly and by implication, to father more children after the Flood, yet the text records that he never does. Working through the layered instructions to enter and leave the Ark, the twin repetitions of Pru Urvu addressed to Noah by name, and the later Ham incident, this article argues that Noah's silence is best explained by Radak's account of a man who lost faith in humanity before the Flood and never recovered it afterward — a reading reinforced by the rabbinic debate over whether the world was worth creating at all.
The laws of the Nazirite are followed, in the triennial reading cycle, by the Haftarah of Samson's birth — an unlikely pairing that this article argues is deliberate. Tracing a long list of narrative parallels between Samson and Absalom (long hair, anger and revenge, consorting with the enemy, betrayal by a confidant, an undignified death), the piece contends that both men mistake their own gifts for license to place themselves above their community, which is exactly the temptation nezirut is designed to guard against.
Psalm 145 (Ashrei) is recited three times daily framed by two added verses that do not belong to the psalm itself: a prologue drawn from Psalms 84:5 and 144:15, and an epilogue from Psalm 115:18. This article surveys literary, communal, and liturgical explanations for why these addenda were attached, and argues that the liturgical explanation — rooted in the practice of pre-worship meditation and the psalm's role introducing the closing unit of Psalms 145-150 — best accounts for their function in the prayer service.
Against the consensus view that Abraham was born in Ur Kasdim and later migrated to Haran, Nahmanides argues from Joshua 24:2-4 and other verses that Abraham was actually born in Haran, moved with Terah to Ur, and only later returned to Haran. This article lays out Nahmanides' proofs, questions several of his underlying assumptions (particularly about the ethnic makeup of Sumer and the location of Cutha), and elaborates a third position — that of R. Nissim of Gerona and Abarbanel — under which Ur Kasdim itself lay within northern Mesopotamia, 'beyond the river.'
Halakha grants orphans preferential legal treatment — their court cases are heard first, and they may charge otherwise-forbidden interest — which raises the question of who actually qualifies as an orphan. Tracing Rambam's definition (a child who has lost a parent and cannot yet care for himself like other adults) to its long-obscure source in the Mekhilta De-Rashbi, this article argues that halakha deliberately confines 'orphan' status to dependent children, and draws out the contemporary implication that hardship alone, without that narrow status, does not entitle an adult to permanent preferential treatment.
Though the word yafeh, beautiful, never appears in the Torah's account of the Mishkan's construction, this article argues that aesthetic considerations were nonetheless built into the project by design. Examining the choice of costly, colorful materials, the description of Bezalel's artistic gifts, the repeated reference to a visual 'pattern' shown to Moses, and the ornamental cups and flowers on the menorah that Rashi himself calls decorative, Spero contends that beauty was cultivated as a genuine, if understated, value in the sanctuary's construction and in the High Priest's garments alike.
Terah receives only eight verses in Genesis, yet the Torah's toldot-headings mark him, not Abraham, as ancestor of the chosen family — a family whose members consistently intermarry among Terah's own descendants. This article argues that Terah's unfinished journey from Ur toward Canaan reflects a genuine, if incomplete, spiritual turn toward God, one that explains why Haran's household already invokes the Lord's name by the time of Rebekah's betrothal, but that it is Abraham's completion of that journey — not its mere initiation — that earns him, and not his father, the title of first patriarch.
Saul's private explanation for David's absence from the New Moon feast — 'it's accidental, he must be unclean and not yet cleansed' — repeats the word tahor twice in a way commentators from Rabbi Isaiah di Trani to Abarbanel have found redundant. Reading the verse's pronoun hu as referring to the absence itself rather than to David produces a different, double-entendre translation, 'it's an event not pure, for it's not pure,' which this article argues better anticipates Saul's explosive reaction the next day, when Jonathan's cover story for David confirms the king's simmering suspicion of his son-in-law's disloyalty.
Daniel 2:1 dates Nebuchadnezzar's dream to 'the second year of his reign,' but this conflicts with the three-year training period Daniel has already undergone in chapter 1. After surveying source-critical, harmonizing, and traditional rabbinic solutions (including Seder Olam's view that the count runs from the Temple's destruction), this article proposes that the phrase is instead a deliberate literary echo of 'after two years' time' in Genesis 41:1, aligning Daniel's rise with Joseph's — a parallel already noticed by the Midrash but not, until now, traced to this specific chronological detail.
The word bara in Genesis 1:1 has long puzzled commentators, since its root literally means 'to cut and form' yet the term is generally taken to denote creation ex nihilo. Drawing on a secondary etymological sense of b-r-a — to grow, expand, or feed — together with Talmudic language describing a world that 'went on expanding' until God said 'enough,' this article proposes reading Genesis 1:1-3 as a loose poetic anticipation of cosmic inflation: bara as sudden expansion, and 'let there be light' as the escape of photons once the early universe thinned out.
A review of The Ethics of Genesis by Rabbi Dr. Abba Engelberg (New York: Kodesh Press, 2014), a book that takes up the ethical questions a thoughtful reader brings to the weekly Torah portion but that classical verse-by-verse commentators tend not to address. Rosenberg highlights the author's boldest arguments — that the Flood may have killed innocent children because open-ended miraculous provision for them was never God's way, and that the true (failed) test of the Akeidah was whether Abraham would challenge an apparently unethical divine command — and concludes the book best serves an English-language reader encountering Genesis's deeper moral questions with fresh eyes.
A firsthand report on the Fifth Annual Hidon Hatanakh for adults, held during Hanukah at Jerusalem's Binyanei Ha'umah before an audience of Bible enthusiasts, with remarks from Prime Minister Netanyahu and Education Minister Naftali Bennett. Adler describes the contest's format — a written qualifying exam followed by oral rounds that narrowed twelve contestants to a final six — and its outcome, a tie between Yafit Soliman of Kfar Yavitz and Levi Sudri of Bet Shemesh after both answered dozens of tie-breaker questions correctly.