Vol. 45:1

Building on a 1996 epidemiological analysis of the ten plagues, the authors argue that the deaths of the tenth plague were the product of a 'syndemic' — the synergistic effect of diseases seeded by the earlier plagues rather than a single sudden affliction. Tracing likely disease vectors (schistosomiasis, malaria, leishmaniasis, anthrax, leptospirosis, brucellosis) through the Nile's contamination, the death of frogs and fish, insect swarms, and diseased livestock, they reconstruct a plausible medical chain of causation running from the first plague to the last. The article situates this natural mechanism within, rather than against, the biblical text's insistence on the plagues' miraculous character and timing.

Angel examines three classical readings of Jeremiah 26 — by Abarbanel, Malbim, and Menahem Boleh — that reconstruct how the priests, prophets, elders, and masses each responded to Jeremiah's prophecy of the Temple's destruction. Each commentator resolves the narrative's ambiguities (who speaks in verses 20-23, why the elders invoke Micah's precedent after a favorable verdict, and why Ahikam still needed to intervene) differently, yielding sharply different portraits of the religious sincerity, cowardice, or wickedness of Jeremiah's various opponents. The article argues that the range of readings shows Jeremiah's adversaries were not uniformly wicked, but included sincerely religious people who were simply convinced, on reasonable grounds, that he was a false prophet.

Ron reconstructs Daniel's chronology from the book's own dating formulas and, borrowing the detail that Joseph was seventeen when taken captive, proposes that Daniel was the same age when brought to Babylon. On that reckoning Daniel turned 77 — a number resonating with the 'seventy weeks' of Daniel 9:24 — in the very year Cyrus proclaimed the end of the exile, and was about 79 or 80 at his final vision. The article argues that this symbolic lifespan makes Daniel a living embodiment of Israel's exile and its unfinished, gradually unfolding redemption, paralleling the extensive Daniel-Joseph literary parallels noted by earlier commentators.

Reading Noah's story through the lens of survivor psychology, Greenberger divides his ordeal into three stages — anticipating the flood, enduring a year of sole responsibility for the ark's passengers, and confronting the devastation upon disembarking — and argues his silence in each stage should not simply be read as a moral failure compared to Moses' or Abraham's intercessions. She contends that Noah's true legacy lies in his post-flood initiative: his sacrifice, understood through midrashic and Rambam-adjacent readings as an act of humility that 'made room' for God, prompts God's covenant and invitation to humanity to partner in maintaining a moral world, an outcome the article treats as more significant than Noah's earlier passivity or his later drunkenness.

Apple examines the Psalm verses appended to Grace After Meals — especially Psalms 34:11 and 37:25 — which assert that the righteous never go hungry, a claim plainly contradicted by ordinary experience and by the Book of Job. Surveying rabbinic and modern responses (Rabbi Yannai's admission that the answer 'is not in our hands,' Hirsch's idea that the righteous do not feel their lack, and the reading of k'firim in 34:11 as either young lions or metaphorical 'unbelievers'), he concludes that the most workable resolution is that the righteous, even when objectively deprived, subjectively transcend their suffering rather than experience divine protection from it.

Vogel traces the long translation history of the ambiguous phrase kol ish ('every man') in the Lord's call for donations to the Tabernacle (Exodus 25:2), showing that translators from Onkelos through the King James and Jewish Publication Society versions split between a literal, male-only rendering and a gender-inclusive one, with several 'quasi-official' translations liberalizing the phrasing between their first and second editions. He argues that the Torah itself resolves the ambiguity ten chapters later, when Exodus 35:22 and 36:6 explicitly include women among the donors and Exodus 38:8 credits women by name for the laver's construction, showing the Torah anticipated and corrected any implication that women held secondary status in this invitation to give.

Spero analyzes Psalm 94:9-10, in which the Psalmist rebuts the 'wicked' who claim God neither sees nor hears, as a four-part graduated argument moving from the ear to the eye to moral instruction to knowledge itself — each premised on the principle that the Creator of a faculty must possess that faculty in its fullest sense. He shows how the choice of verbs (noteh for the ear's placement, yabit for the eye's directed, intentional gaze) signals increasing complexity, culminating in the claim that God's teaching of da'at to man implies not merely divine awareness but a fully rational, moral will — a version of the classical Argument from Design that Spero connects to Maimonides and John Stuart Mill.

Rosenberg reviews Michael Fishbane's volume on Song of Songs in the JPS Bible Commentary series, which tackles the book's long-standing interpretive dilemma — plain romantic meaning versus rabbinic allegory — by running four parallel commentaries (peshat, derash, remez, and sod) on every verse. He highlights Fishbane's innovative remez (philosophical) and sod (mystical) layers as genuine advances over prior literal and allegorical treatments such as ArtScroll's and the Da'at Mikra series, concluding that the book rewards sustained study more than any other volume yet published in the series.

Rosenberg reviews Meir Bar-Ilan's edition of The Words of Gad the Seer, a pseudepigraphic work attributed to the otherwise-lost prophetic book mentioned in 1 Chronicles 29:29, preserved only in a manuscript brought from the Jews of Cochin, India to Cambridge around 1806. He describes Bar-Ilan's thirty years of research establishing the manuscript's textual and codicological features (masoretic notes, scribal peculiarities) and its dating debate between a first-century-BCE and a 12th-16th-century composition, and highlights two of the work's more striking narrative expansions — the Moabite shepherd's conversion and the continuation of Tamar's story after Absalom's revenge — as the volume's most interesting original contribution.

Porath-Zibman reviews Samuel Balentine's thematic study of the Book of Job, praising its fresh chapters on minor characters such as Job's wife and its wide-ranging history of Job's reception across theology, art, and literature. She faults the book on two fronts: its treatment of God and the Satan cites only Saadiah Gaon and Maimonides among Jewish commentators despite centuries of further discussion, and its reliance on pop-culture touchstones — an episode of the television show House, a Google search on 'hero' — undercuts its scholarly seriousness even as it may appeal to a more casual reader.

Responding to Yosef Green's reappraisal of Jeroboam ben Nabat (JBQ 44:2), Adler agrees that Jeroboam had positive attributes but argues his choice of golden calves as cult objects at Dan and Beth-El was indefensible given their idolatrous associations since the time of Moses. Adler suggests Jeroboam could have followed the precedent of Moses' bronze serpent (Numbers 21:9) instead, noting that a snake image was in fact preserved for centuries afterward even among Davidic kings in Judah, until it was finally destroyed during the reign of Hezekiah.