Vol. 47:1
Exodus 16 poses a puzzle: the people's complaint and the Lord's promises give equal weight to 'meat' and 'bread', yet quails appear and vanish within a single half-verse while the manna dominates the rest of the chapter. Building on the observation that leḥem/basar (bread/meat) functions elsewhere in the Bible — in prose merisms and in poetic parallelism (I Kings 17:6, Isaiah 44:19, Daniel 10:3) — as a figurative pair meaning simply 'food', the article shows that the three occurrences of the word-pair in Exodus 16:3, 8, and 12 are embedded poetic bicola using this same figurative sense rather than literal promises of meat. It concludes that verse 13a, which reports the quails' arrival, was a later gloss added by someone who misunderstood the figurative idiom, and that the original chapter was a story about the manna alone.
A survey of the historical and rabbinic record surrounding the translation of the Hebrew Bible into Greek, from the Letter of Aristeas's legendary account of seventy-two scholars producing the Septuagint for Ptolemy II, through the parallel and diverging versions of that legend in Sefer Torah, Soferim, and TB Megillah 9a. The article traces rabbinic ambivalence toward 'Greek Wisdom' versus the Greek language itself, and follows the later Jewish revisions of Aquila, Theodotion, and Symmachus that arose once the Septuagint had been adopted by the Church. It closes by situating these translations within the broader tension between Hellenistic acculturation and the preservation of Jewish religious identity.
A study of the Hebrew exclamation Amen, tracing its root (aleph-mem-nun, 'to be firm, faithful') and its grammatical status as a stative verb comparable to kasher or zaken. The article surveys Amen's biblical role as a legal and liturgical response — in the Pentateuch's oath-confirmations, the Psalter's doxologies, and the synagogue's benediction responses — and argues that two apparent biblical instances of an introductory Amen (I Kings 1:36, Jeremiah 28:6) are, on closer analysis, still functioning as responses. It closes by contrasting this exclusively responsive biblical and talmudic usage with the New Testament's introductory Amen, and surveys various theories for that shift.
Against the popular image of Joseph as the architect of Egypt's impoverishment and enslavement, a close reading of Genesis 41-47 suggests a different story. The article argues from the vocabulary of pikadon (a returnable deposit) and shever (provisions) that Joseph's original grain policy was a free, trust-based distribution, and that it was Pharaoh — a demonstrated micromanager of Joseph's every move — who later imposed the sale of grain for money, livestock, land, and person. On this reading, the eventual arrangement amounted to a flat 20% tax with the Egyptians remaining on their own land, and Joseph functioned as a reluctant intermediary shielding Pharaoh from popular resentment rather than as the mastermind of the Egyptians' ruin.
A reconsideration of Exodus 6:3, in which God tells Moses that He appeared to the patriarchs as El Shaddai but 'did not become known' to them by the name YHWH — a claim seemingly contradicted by Genesis passages where the patriarchs use that very name. The authors propose repunctuating the verse so that 'I did not become known to them' stands as its own clause, and argue that the verb yada' here carries its specialized sense of intimate, face-to-face knowing (as in Deuteronomy 34:10 regarding Moses) rather than mere awareness of a name. On this reading, the patriarchs knew God's name and experienced His appearances, but did not attain the singular face-to-face relationship later granted to Moses.
Exodus 2:10 says only that 'she named him Moses,' leaving the antecedent of 'she' ambiguous between Pharaoh's daughter and Moses' birth mother Yokheved. Ancient sources (Artapanus, Philo, Josephus, Pseudo-Philo) and the rabbinic midrashim overwhelmingly assign the naming to the princess, despite the difficulty that the name's etymology is explained in Hebrew rather than Egyptian. The article shows that the formula 'she named him,' va-tikra et shmo, otherwise belongs exclusively to mothers naming their own children throughout Genesis and beyond, and weighs this pattern — along with the minority view of Hizkuni and Abarbanel that Yokheved did the naming — against the near-universal consensus that it was the Egyptian princess.
Aaron's central role in fashioning the golden calf sits uneasily with his stature as high priest, and his claim that the calf 'sprang forth' on its own has long strained credulity. The article proposes that masseka, the word used for the calf, derives not from a root meaning 'to cast a molten image' but from masak, 'to mix' or 'pour,' and denotes a ritual laver of the kind adorned with bull imagery in Solomon's Temple and across the ancient Near East. On this reading, Aaron's true intention was to build a laver-altar complex that would remind Israel of the purification required before divine service — a plan the people fatally misappropriated as an idol — and the article draws out a further parallel between the golden calf's aftermath and the ritual of the sota, the errant woman, to argue that Aaron's underlying goal throughout was reconciliation between Israel and God.