Vol. 45:4

Friedman argues that Amenhotep III, whose reign shows a documented gap that Egyptologist Arielle Kozloff attributes to a national epidemic crisis, is the best candidate for the pharaoh of the Exodus. He correlates biblical details — Sekhmet worship, the toponyms Ramesses and Raamesses, and rabbinic chronologies for the Israelite sojourn and enslavement — with the reigns of Amenhotep III, Akhenaten, Hatshepsut, and Thutmose III. The article also revisits Manetho's two Exodus-like accounts preserved by Josephus, proposing that their portrayal of a Thutmossid pharaoh and an 'Amenophis' who expels a diseased population offers non-biblical corroboration for this dating.

Caesar argues that the destruction of 185,000 Assyrian soldiers in Second Kings 19:35 is best explained as an outbreak of septicemic plague, the deadliest and fastest-killing of the three historical forms of the disease. Drawing on Herodotus's account of mice overrunning the Assyrian camp — long read by classicists as a symbol of pestilence — and on comparative evidence from the Plague of Justinian and the Black Death, he argues that the unsanitary, crowded conditions of a besieging army made it especially vulnerable to a fast-moving epidemic. He further notes that Assyrian kings routinely omitted military disasters from their own annals, and that Assyrian sources elsewhere attribute army-destroying plagues to the wrath of the plague god Nergal, paralleling the biblical framing of the episode as an act of God.

Building on Hermann Gunkel's foundational work on biblical etiology, Farkas surveys how the Bible explains the origins of names and places, distinguishing etiologies (which explain origins) from the Talmudic principle of shema garim (which reads character out of a name). He classifies etiologies as explicit (Noah, Gilgal, Bokhim), doubled (Be'er Sheva, Isaac, Edom, the naming of several tribal ancestors), or hidden and merely implied (Har Seir, Paran, Petah Einayim, the Yabbok river, Kadesh). The article argues that recognizing these layered etiologies — even the unstated ones — uncovers meaning in the text that a surface reading misses.

Of the 224 occurrences of the Hebrew Bäbel in the Tanakh, only the two in Genesis 10:10 and 11:9 are conventionally rendered 'Babel' rather than 'Babylon.' Dyck surveys how TWOT, BDB, Gesenius, HALOT, Clines, Swanson, and the Old Greek translation treat the word, finding that most lexicons either equivocate or default to an etymological link with the verb balal ('to confuse'). Through a syntactic analysis of the two Genesis verses and comparison with the word's other 222 occurrences, he concludes that there is no linguistic basis for treating 'Babel' as a distinct location from Babylon, the capital of Babylonia, and that 'Babylon' is the more accurate translation in both verses.

Sharon argues that the biblical narrator deliberately uses ambiguous Hebrew terms — na'ar and katan — to create the impression that David was small at the time of the Goliath episode, even though other details (Saul's armor fitting him, his taking up Goliath's sword) imply he was physically large. This calculated ambiguity, paralleled by the treatment of the adult Benjamin as a 'child' in Genesis 44, serves the story's theological point: that God, unlike Saul or Goliath, does not judge by outward appearance, and that Israel's victory over its enemies depends on divine deliverance rather than physical might.