Vol. 47:3
Unlike Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, Joseph is never shown praying to God, nor does God ever speak directly to him, despite Joseph's evident God-consciousness. The article argues that Joseph regarded his life's course as already divinely scripted from childhood — a destiny as fixed as if it had already occurred — so that petitionary prayer to alter it would have been a 'vain prayer' (tefillat shav) in the sense of the Mishnah. Joseph's silence is thus read not as a lack of faith but as the deepest form of it: total submission to a providence he believed could not be renegotiated, prefiguring the mindset of the later prophets who spoke of the future in the past tense.
An examination of Milton's 1671 dramatic poem Samson Agonistes as a reworking of Judges 13-16, arguing that Milton uses the biblical Samson both to deepen the psychology of the original figure — his blindness, his hair, his relationship with Delilah, his final act of violence — and to comment allegorically on the Puritan and Restoration political struggles in which Milton himself was enmeshed. The article catalogues the poem's departures from the biblical text (new characters like Harapha, a living Manoa, an introspective Samson who moves from despair to penitence) and situates Milton's method alongside classical Midrash as a legitimate, if 'anxious,' form of creative re-reading of Scripture.
A linguistic survey situating Biblical Hebrew within the Semitic family and the larger Hamito-Semitic (Afro-Asiatic) phylum, and characterizing its phonology, morphology and syntax as broadly typical of a Semitic language. The article's most speculative claim is that Biblical Hebrew's pervasive triliteral-root system — in which nearly all content words are organized around a single unifying morphological principle — may itself have been a contributing factor, alongside historical, geographical and sociological causes, in the development of Israelite monotheism's single formative religious concept.
The Talmud records three separate polemical encounters between the sages and an otherwise obscure figure called Jacob the Heretic, one of which turns on whether Nehemiah 8:4's list of Ezra's students names twelve people or thirteen — that is, whether 'Zecharia' and 'Meshulam' at the end of the list are two names for one person or two people missing a conjunction. The article argues that this ostensibly technical exegetical dispute is in fact polemical: a leader-with-twelve-disciples motif was of live interest to Jews and Christians in late antiquity, and Rav Yehudah's insistence on exactly six Ezra loyalists to Ezra's right and six to his left is best read as reasserting Jewish ownership of that motif against early Christian claims, with the Yom Kippur aliyah count offered only afterward as a secondary, legal peg for the same reading.
Why does seven weeks separate the Exodus from the Sinai covenant, and why is Shavuot named for a count rather than given a fixed calendar date? The article reads each station of the wilderness journey — Succot, Marah, the manna and quail, Rephidim, and the battle with Amalek — as a deliberately staged lesson in collective organization and mutual reliance, arguing that this seven-week interlude was what actually made a formerly atomized population of slaves capable of the unified, credible national response demanded at Sinai: 'all the people answered together.'
Bird offerings were killed not by shehita but by melika — pinching or severing the neck with a priest's fingernail alone, no knife involved, a method that would render any other bird prohibited as neveila. The article surveys the etymological uncertainty around the term, the Talmudic description of the technique, and the traditional attempts (Moshav Zekeinim, Recanati, Sefer haChinuch, R. Hirsch) to find symbolic meaning in it — either as an image of sin and the sinner's exposed neck, or as a lesson about expediting the poor person's offering — alongside more technical explanations tied to the small quantity of a bird's blood and the prohibition on using a blade upon the altar.
Though not usually classed among the pashtanim, the Provençal halakhic authority R. Abraham b. David (Raavad, c. 1125–1198) repeatedly invokes the plain sense of a verse — ein mikra yotzeh miydei peshuto, 'a verse never loses its plain meaning' — to check or dissent from Maimonides in his glosses on the Mishneh Torah. The article traces this method across philosophical questions (anthropomorphism, the nature of the Messianic era) and legal ones (justifiable homicide against a burglar, the scope of priestly mourning restrictions, tithing exemptions, and the classification of skin afflictions), arguing that Raavad's willingness to let plain meaning constrain legal generalization makes him a genuine, if overlooked, practitioner of pshat-based halakhic reasoning.
In Genesis 27, Rebecca's engineering of Jacob's blessing reads to many traditional and modern commentators alike as manipulative, even a form of elder abuse against the failing Isaac. The extra-biblical Book of Jubilees (2nd century BCE) tells the same story very differently: Rebecca acts in concert with her father-in-law Abraham's own explicit wishes for Jacob, Isaac himself later comes around to endorse the choice, and 'the change was from heaven' rather than mere deception. The article argues that Jubilees systematically rehabilitates Rebecca into a commanding, prophetic, priest-like matriarch — more voluble and more visible than her Genesis counterpart — in service of the book's two governing concerns: harmonious relations among the patriarchs and matriarchs, and the promotion of endogamous marriage.
A review of Rabbi Reuven Chaim Klein's God versus Gods: Judaism in the Age of Idolatry (Mosaica Press, 2018) — the first of a planned two-volume study of idolatry from the biblical period through the destruction of the First Temple. The review praises the book's reader-friendly chronological structure, its encyclopedia-style catalogue of ancient deities named in the Bible, and its integration of classical rabbinic sources with academic and archaeological scholarship, singling out its closing chapter on idolatry's transition into more 'rarified,' modern forms after prophecy itself ceased.
A review of Malka Z. Simkovich's Discovering Second Temple Literature: The Scriptures and Stories That Shaped Early Judaism (JPS/University of Nebraska, 2018), which surveys the modern recovery of Second Temple sources (the Cairo Genizah, the Dead Sea Scrolls), the distinct Jewish communities of Jerusalem, Alexandria and Antioch, the worldviews of Wisdom Seekers and Sectarians, and the era's holy and 'rewritten' texts. The review commends the book as a valuable complement to the three-volume Outside the Bible (2013), while faulting its introduction for never settling on clear chronological boundaries for what counts as the 'Second Temple Era.'