Vol. 46:1

Reading Genesis 2-3 through peshat and midrash, this article traces a sustained biblical motif linking humankind and trees — from the parallel creation of man and trees in Eden, through Deuteronomy's paired laws of the life-preserving fruit tree and the corpse cut down from a tree, to rabbinic discussions of human creativity versus divine design. It argues that Adam and Eve's shame-driven turn to the garden's fig leaves and trees, and the later halakhic category of 'orlah governing a young fruit tree's first years, reflect an evolving, jointly-authored relationship between God, man, and tree in the aftermath of the expulsion from Eden.

Examines R. Reuven Margaliot's claim — also found in an unpublished manuscript of R. Saadia Gaon — that Jeroboam's cultic innovation in I Kings 12:32-33 was not simply moving Sukkot to the eighth month but changing the rule governing intercalation of the Hebrew calendar, adding a leap Elul (as in the Babylonian calendar) rather than a leap Adar. Compares this to King Hezekiah's calendar intervention in II Chronicles 30 and the Mishnah's criticism of it, arguing that in both cases the biblical and rabbinic critique targeted improper calendrical authority rather than the date of the festival itself.

Applies a phonetics-based reading to the Song of the Sea (Exodus 15) and its surrounding narrative, cataloguing paired words that sound alike across two overlapping units — Exodus 13:17-15:19 and 14:30-15:27 — even where their Hebrew roots differ. Argues these sound-echoes reinforce the episode's dramatic irony and its measure-for-measure justice, first meted out against the pursuing Egyptians and then, in the water crisis at Marah, against the celebrating Israelites themselves, tempering national triumphalism with empathy for the defeated.

Argues that Joseph, despite his proximity and authority in Egypt, deliberately avoided visiting his father Jacob throughout the seventeen years in Goshen except twice, when summoned to Jacob's bedside, because he feared any encounter would force disclosure of his brothers' role in his kidnapping and thereby destroy Jacob's relationship with his other sons. Marshals close textual readings — the impersonal phrasing of the summons in Genesis 47:29 and 48:1, the brothers' absence from the mourning scenes, and Jacob's death-bed allusion to violence against Joseph — to support this reconstruction against Ramban's competing view that Jacob never learned the truth.

Challenges the conventional English rendering 'Passover' for Pesah, tracing the translation to William Tyndale's sixteenth-century distinction between the Jewish Pesah and the Christian Pascha (rendered 'Easter'). Surveys the disputed etymology and biblical usage of the verb p-s-h — to skip or limp versus to protect or spare — through Rashi, Ibn Ezra, Rashbam, Onkelos, and modern scholars such as Carol Meyers and Tamara Prosic, concluding that the root more accurately conveys divine protection and compassion than the neutral, even dismissive, sense 'pass over' carries in modern English.

Examines the golden bells (pa'amonim) sewn onto the hem of the High Priest's robe in Exodus 28, arguing that beyond marking sacred status and separating priestly space from the profane, the bells served an apotropaic function — warding off dangerous spirits at the threshold of the sanctuary — paralleled in Near Eastern priestly costume, the Egyptian sistrum, and later Jewish and Christian bell-magic. Engages the Kaufmann-Cross debate over whether Israelite religion evolved from surrounding pagan practice, arguing the biblical text preserves traces of a magical origin even as it reframes the bells' stated purpose.

Asks why the Bible's hametz prohibition on Passover is unusually strict — comparable in scope only to the prohibition against idols — and argues, building on Maimonides' explanation of the year-round ban on offering leaven at the altar, that hametz was itself bound up with Egyptian idolatry. Draws on the Joseph narrative (Potiphar withholding 'bread' from Joseph, the Egyptians' refusal to eat bread with Hebrews as an 'abomination') and the Zohar's identification of Egypt with hametz to suggest that the Egyptians revered their invented leavening process, making its destruction on Passover a repudiation of Egyptian idol worship.

Traces the term mishloach manot beyond its familiar association with Purim (Esther 9:22) to Nehemiah 8's account of the first Rosh Hashanah celebration under Ezra, arguing that sending food portions — paired in both texts with giving to the poor — was a standard Persian-era holiday practice rather than a custom unique to Purim. Connects this pattern, and an unusual Talmudic account of a Purim bonfire-jumping custom, to Persian Nowruz festivities, arguing that Jews adopted regional expressions of festivity into existing biblical holidays without borrowing the holidays themselves.

A brief philological note surveying the Aramaic term uleimta, the Targumic cognate of the Hebrew 'almah ('young woman'), which occurs over seventy times across the Targumim compared to 'almah's nine biblical occurrences. Shows that the Targumim apply uleimta to married and non-virgin women alike — Dinah after her rape, the Levite's concubine in Judges 19, Ruth as the widow of Mahlon — undermining claims, echoed since Jerome, that 'almah exclusively denotes a virgin, and argues that this abundant Aramaic evidence makes recourse to Ugaritic, Arabic, or Latin cognates unnecessary to interpret Isaiah 7:14.

Review of Everett Fox's The Early Prophets: Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings (Schocken Bible Vol. 2, 2014), the sequel to Fox's The Five Books of Moses. Highlights Fox's aural, rhythm-attentive translation method, his use of Hebraized personal and place names within the text alongside standard English forms in his introductions, and the volume's book-by-book introductions and running notes, concluding that it succeeds both as a study aid and as an attempt to recover the Hebrew text's oral character.

Review of David J. Zucker and Moshe Reiss's The Matriarchs of Genesis: Seven Women, Five Views (2015), which expands the traditional four matriarchs to seven by including the maidservants Zilpah and Bilhah alongside Abraham's second wife Hagar. Notes the book's use of biblical, early extra-biblical, rabbinic, post-rabbinic, and contemporary feminist sources to address the sparse and often contradictory information about these women, and situates the book within a broader contemporary reassessment of women's roles in Jewish religious life.