Vol. 47:2

A memorial tribute to Dr. Shimon Bakon, longtime Editor of the Jewish Bible Quarterly (known earlier as Dor le Dor), who died in February 2019 at age 103. It traces his path from Czechoslovakia through wartime emigration and U.S. Army service to a career in Jewish education, his 1974 aliyah, and his more than two decades as Editor, during which he built the journal's international reputation and readership.

Exodus 15:25b-26 has long puzzled commentators: after the episode of the bitter waters at Marah, the text abruptly speaks of the Lord 'setting law and statute' for the people and 'testing' them. Building on Rashbam's reading, this article argues that the phrase 'set for someone law and statute' is a fixed idiom — attested also in Joshua 24:25 and I Samuel 30:25 — meaning the establishment of a binding precedent from experience, and that nissah here means 'to give a difficult, instructive experience' rather than 'to test.' Read this way, the two clauses of v. 25b and the promise in v. 26 form a single, coherent unit rather than a poorly stitched editorial patchwork.

This article traces the arc of Saul and Jonathan's relationship across the books of Samuel, from an early rivalry for military glory, through the crisis of the honey-eating oath and its near-fatal consequences for Jonathan, to the decisive rupture caused by David's rise. It argues that Jonathan's repeated loyalty to David — concealed from, and ultimately punished by, his father — reflects a broader biblical strategy of legitimizing David's claim to the throne, even as Jonathan himself never abandons Saul, fighting and dying alongside him at Mount Gilboa.

Manoah's wife is anonymous in Judges 13 yet gradually becomes the story's most active figure, and this article traces how three late Second Temple retellings — Josephus's Judean Antiquities, the Hebrew Biblical Antiquities (Pseudo-Philo), and the Hellenistic homily 'On Samson' — each expand her role further, giving her beauty, a name, courage, and theological insight far beyond what Judges provides. Comparing the three versions against the biblical text and against rabbinic parallels in Numbers Rabbah, the article shows each source adding its own distinct emphasis: physical description and jealousy drama in Josephus, penitent self-blame in Biblical Antiquities, and rhetorical praise for her perceptiveness in 'On Samson.'

Numbers 12:1 mentions, without explanation, a 'Cushite woman' whom Moses married, and this article traces how ancient and medieval sources tried to identify her — either with Zipporah, via a midrashic equation of 'Cushite' with 'beautiful,' or with a separate Ethiopian queen Moses married and ruled beside during a legendary sojourn in Cush. Comparing the accounts of Artapanus, Josephus, and Yalkut Shimoni, the article shows how each version handles the delicate question of whether Moses actually consummated a marriage with a foreign queen, and argues that the legend served to fill a gap in Moses's biography while enhancing his stature as a leader and, in its rabbinic form, preserving his fidelity to the patriarchal prohibition on marrying outside the family line.

Exodus 14 distinguishes between the Egyptians 'knowing' the Lord, an effect already achieved by the ten plagues, and the Lord 'gaining glory' through Pharaoh's pursuit at the sea, a distinct and higher outcome. This article argues that the plagues established the Lord's mastery over nature for all people, while the splitting of the Sea revealed a unique, elective relationship between the Lord and Israel specifically — a use of kavod paralleled elsewhere in the Torah's depiction of the Tabernacle, the Ark, and the Temple — and that recognizing this distinction clarifies why the people respond to the sea's splitting with awe rather than mere belief.

Daniel 12:2 is traditionally read as an explicit prooftext for bodily resurrection of the dead, and Maimonides even singled it out as admitting no other interpretation. Yet this article traces a minority allegorical reading — that the verse describes national restoration rather than literal resurrection — from the pagan philosopher Porphyry and Syriac Christian exegetes through its sole named medieval Jewish exponent, the Karaite Yeshua ben Yehuda, whose view survives only because Ibn Ezra quotes it. The article argues that Ibn Ezra's ambiguous treatment of Yeshua's opinion, and later discussions by Albo and others of similarly allegorized verses like Ezekiel's dry bones and Isaiah 26:19, suggest a persistent undercurrent of rationalist discomfort with literal resurrection language.

The Torah gives two seemingly incompatible figures for Israel's time in Egypt — 400 years of oppression (Genesis 15:13) against 430 years of total residence (Exodus 12:40), further complicated by the claim that only four generations would pass (Genesis 15:16). Rather than following Ramban's move of transposing the verse or Sarna's proposal that 'generation' means a variable life-span, this article calculates the actual years each of Levi's four descendants (Levi, Kohath, Amram, Aaron) spent in Egypt from the genealogical data given in the text, finds their sum comes to exactly 430, and proposes that the traditional figures describe the summed years of overlapping generations rather than a single continuous span — which would substantially shorten the real duration of the sojourn while leaving the biblical numbers intact.

A review of Religion and Contemporary Management: Moses as a Model for Effective Leadership by Arthur Wolak (Anthem Press, 2016), which argues that Moses's humility and empathy — traits at odds with the usual profile of a modern leader — are in fact the core competencies of effective leadership, and surveys how theories from Freud's Great Man Theory to modern transformational leadership models map onto the biblical portrait of Moses.

A review of An Introduction to Israel's Wisdom Traditions, edited by John L. McLaughlin (Eerdmans, 2018), an introductory textbook covering Proverbs, Job, and Ecclesiastes alongside their ancient Near Eastern parallels — including close comparisons with the Epic of Gilgamesh and Egyptian wisdom texts — as well as the deuterocanonical Wisdom of Ben Sira and Wisdom of Solomon.