Vol. 47:4

Against the common view that Genesis 1 and Genesis 2-3 are separate creation accounts, this article argues that the two chapters form a single interdependent narrative. Because Genesis 1 tells us almost nothing about God except what God does, being created 'in the image of God' must refer to specific divine actions — chiefly naming things and judging them to be good. Genesis 2-3 then dramatizes humanity's struggle with exactly these two capacities: Adam is given the task of naming the animals, while Eve's fatal error is forming her own judgment that the forbidden fruit is 'good.' The article develops two complementary readings of this dynamic — one cautionary, one developmental — and traces how Adam's renaming of Eve as Hava after the expulsion signals a return to sanctioned naming.

A survey of the metallurgy and material culture behind the Bible's hundreds of references to silver, drawing on the chemistry of ancient smelting and cupellation to illuminate biblical vocabulary for furnaces, crucibles, bellows, and dross. The article traces silver from ore source (notably Tarshish) through refining technique to its uses as tribute, plunder, currency, cast idols, musical instruments, and Tabernacle and Temple fittings, and shows how the Bible repeatedly turns the physical process of purifying silver into a moral metaphor for purifying Israel.

Many Sephardi, Oriental, and some Ashkenazi communities read Psalm 22 as the special psalm for Purim, a custom this article traces to a rabbinic tradition, especially the Midrash Tehillim, that reads the psalm as reflecting the ordeal of Esther's marriage to Ahasuerus. After working through the psalm's obscure heading, its opening cry of abandonment, and its turn from lament to praise at verse 22, the article argues that Esther's suffering as 'the morning star' and Haman's role as the unnamed enemy compared to dogs, bulls, and lions gave the community a text that supplied the divine name missing from the Book of Esther itself, and thereby helped Purim secure liturgical standing as the first post-Pentateuch festival.

An examination of the notoriously ambiguous Deuteronomy 26:5 formula 'Arami oved avi,' recited in both the First Fruits declaration and the Passover Haggadah. The article lays out the classical rabbinic reading, followed by Rashi, that identifies the 'Aramean' as Lavan attempting to destroy Jacob, against the counter-readings of Ibn Ezra, Sforno, and Rashbam (with support from the Septuagint), which take oved to mean 'wandering' or 'poor' and identify the wandering Aramean as Jacob himself, or even Abraham. Working through the Semitic root's semantic range, the author concludes that the verse may function as figurative, collective speech in which every generation identifies with an ancestor who was himself once a stateless wanderer, a rhetorical move paralleled elsewhere in Deuteronomy and Ezekiel.

Building on Elchanan Samet's concept of the 'split narrative' — a single story divided in the Torah's final redaction for chronological, literary, or thematic reasons — this article argues that Moses' invitation to his father-in-law in Numbers 10:29-32 is the missing conclusion of the Jethro story in Exodus 18, excised and relocated to frame the Israelites' departure from Sinai. Reinserting the four verses restores near-perfect symmetry of length between the two halves of the Exodus 18 narrative, completes several seven-fold key-word patterns (Jethro/father-in-law, Israel/people, and the word 'good'), and answers the long-standing exegetical puzzle of why Moses is absent from the state dinner honoring his father-in-law. The article closes with a full reconstituted text of the combined narrative.

Tattenai, the Persian governor who questioned the Jews' right to rebuild the Second Temple in Ezra 5-6, is read by some commentators as a neutral bureaucrat and by others, following Rashi, as an adversary of the Jews. This article argues that the plot structure of the Tattenai episode — an official who tries to harm the Jews, appeals to the king, is met by the recollection of a forgotten record, and is answered with the opposite of what he sought — closely parallels the Haman narrative in Esther and the accusation against Daniel in Daniel 6. The parallel, already sensed by the Geonic-era Targum Rishon to Esther, which makes Haman's wife Zeresh the daughter of Tattenai, supports reading Tattenai as belonging among the Bible's recurring gallery of failed adversaries of the Jews.

The Passover Haggadah explains why Jews eat matzah — there was no time for the dough to leaven before the Exodus — but never explains why chametz is so severely forbidden. Reconstructing the sequence of events on the night of the Exodus from Exodus 12, the author argues that the Israelites, reassured by the death of the firstborn that their oppressors had been dealt a decisive blow, began leisurely preparing their ordinary breakfast of leavened bread instead of the provisions for departure they had been commanded to ready. On this reading, chametz became a symbol of the inertia of habit and reluctance to seize a moment of historic opportunity, a meaning the Rabbis left largely unstated because it exposed the Israelites' own hesitation to leave Egypt.

A review of New Testament People – A Rabbi's Notes (Bloomington: Author House, 2016), Raymond Apple's collection of ninety-eight brief articles written to advance Jewish-Christian dialogue. The review surveys Apple's treatment of Jesus, Mary, and Paul, his contrast of Jewish and Christian concepts of God, and his handling of the virgin-birth prophecy debate over Isaiah 7:14, concluding that the book offers a welcome and enthusiastic Jewish perspective alongside works like Sandmel's A Jewish Understanding of the New Testament and the Jewish Annotated New Testament.

A review of Rabbi Francis Nataf's Redeeming Relevance in the Book of Leviticus (Urim Publications, 2019), the concluding volume of his four-part series making the broader themes of the Torah accessible to contemporary readers. The review highlights Nataf's treatment of Offerings, Purity, and Sanctity, and his handling of Leviticus's two narrative episodes — the deaths of Nadav and Avihu and the unnamed blasphemer of Danite ancestry — judging the volume a valuable, if debatable, attempt to redeem meaning from the most ritually remote of the five books of the Torah.