Vol. 46:2

A comparative study of the Bible's various lists of Canaanite nations — the genealogy of Canaan's sons in Genesis 10, the ten nations promised to Abraham in Genesis 15, and the recurring six- and seven-nation lists in Exodus, Deuteronomy, Joshua, and I Kings — that catalogues the discrepancies in number, name, and order among them. Drawing chiefly on traditional Jewish exegesis rather than academic scholarship, the article surveys rabbinic and medieval attempts to identify obscure nations like the Hivites and the Kenites, Kenizzites, and Kadmonites, and concludes by examining the idea, developed by Rashi, Mizrahi, and Ibn Ezra among others, that the term Canaanite functioned in the Bible both as the name of a specific nation and as an inclusive super-nation term covering all the peoples of the land.

Argues that the book of Jeremiah's relentless message of destruction in its first nineteen chapters — dramatized by the smashed jug of chapter 19 and the divorce imagery of chapter 3 — is not mere hyperbole but a deliberate rhetorical strategy: the people had to believe exile could be permanent and unconditional in order to be moved to repent. Only after the exile actually begins does Jeremiah's letter to the captives in Babylon (chapter 29) offer any comfort, and even the famous seventy-year prophecy, read against the two-year return promised by the false prophet Hananiah, functions less as consolation than as a sobering demand to settle in for the long term. The article argues that by instructing the exiles to build houses, plant vineyards, marry, and seek Bavel's welfare — activities Deuteronomy associates with the Land of Israel itself — Jeremiah effectively sanctifies Babylon as a surrogate holy land, laying the groundwork for the Torah centers that would later sustain Judaism in exile.

Defends the traditional heading of Psalm 34, which links the psalm to David feigning madness before King Achish/Abimelech (I Samuel 21), against critics like Oesterley and Buttenweiser who dismiss the superscription as a mistaken or poetically worthless addition. Working through the psalm's alphabetical acrostic structure — including its missing vav-verse and its extra, non-acrostic peh-verse of redemption — the article argues that the poem alternates between autobiographical reflection and Wisdom-style generalization, and that this personal dimension, together with the closing declaration that God redeems his servants, supports reading the historical heading as original and apt rather than an editorial error.

Argues, on close grammatical grounds, that God's command to Moses in Deuteronomy 32:50 — mut, the blunt singular imperative "die," rather than the future tense ve-tamut — means that Moses himself had to take some action to bring about his own death, unlike Aaron, whom God simply "gathers." Comparing Deuteronomy 34:10's unique description of Moses as known by God panim el panim ("face to face") with the intimate, fatal sense of "knowing" God's face found in Jacob's encounter at Peniel, the authors propose that Moses obtained God's permission to see His face a second time — fatal, as God had warned forty years earlier at the burning bush — and that this, rather than natural causes, is how Moses died on Mount Nevo.

Explores when and how Jacob and Joseph themselves became conscious of playing a role in a providential drama larger than their family quarrel — the drama, foretold to Abraham, of Israel's descent into Egypt. The article traces Joseph's realization back to the moment in Egypt when his brothers' bowing triggers the flashback to his own prophetic dreams, and Jacob's back to his puzzled but retained memory of those same dreams, arguing that neither man grasped the full scope of the destiny he sensed himself serving, and that Jacob's eventual decision to descend to Egypt itself was made in that same spirit of faith in Providence.

Asks why Leviticus 25:1 goes out of its way to note that the laws of shemittah and yovel were given to Moses "on Mount Sinai," since the whole Torah was given there. Tracing six linguistic and thematic parallels between the shemittah/yovel legislation of Parshat Behar and the revelation narrative — counting sabbatical weeks of years versus weeks to Shavuot, the shofar blasts marking both the jubilee and Sinai, the sanctification language shared by both scenes, and the freeing of slaves and return to ancestral land — the article argues that Sinai and the Shabbat-cycle laws are persistently paired throughout the Torah, and concludes that the socioeconomic message of rest for workers, animals, and land is Sinai's fundamental, underlying theme.

Examines cases where the Septuagint (LXX) reflects a different vocalization or clause division of the same consonantal text as the Masoretic Text, and argues that rabbinic literature sometimes preserves the reading tradition underlying the LXX even where the Masoretes rejected it. Using Exodus 22:13's watchman law and Genesis 47:31's account of Jacob bowing as clear examples — where midrashic and talmudic sources echo the LXX's vocalization despite following MT's consonants — the article extends the method to two unresolved cases in Isaiah (9:7 and 24:23), suggesting that some of these consonantal ambiguities may have been intentional, functioning like the rabbinic al-tikre technique of reading a word two ways at once.