Vol. 48:1

Baumol traces a recurring biblical pattern in which a gentile figure — Melchizedek, Jethro, Rahab, Hiram of Tyre, and the Queen of Sheba — hears of Israel's God, comes to the Israelite camp, and responds with blessing before returning home. Reading this pattern across Abraham, Moses, Joshua, David, and Solomon as five progressive stages of a single divine plan, he argues that each stage was meant to culminate in the nations recognizing God through Israel, a mission fulfilled only partially before Solomon's own decline. The article closes by connecting this ancient pattern to modern expressions of gentile support for Israel.

Curwin reads the Book of Genesis as a chiasm centered on the single, brief chapter devoted to Isaac alone, arguing that this structural centrality makes Isaac — not Abraham or Jacob — the pivotal figure whose faithfulness represents the road not taken. Contrasting Isaac's undivided devotion to Rebecca and to the land with Abraham's descent to Egypt and use of Hagar, and with Jacob's later flight to Mesopotamia, he argues that Isaac's willingness to forgo alternatives and rely on prayer models the exclusive covenantal faithfulness (ne'emanut) that the Torah's later legal covenant at Sinai would formalize.

Greenberger reads the story of Judah and Tamar (Gen. 38) as a psychological account of a man's collapse and partial recovery of self-esteem following his role in selling Joseph. She traces textual cues — Judah's unnamed and unloved wife, his silence in mourning, his hasty and unjust judgments of Tamar as a katlanit and later as a supposed harlot — to argue that Judah's estrangement from his family left him isolated and prone to self-protective blame. Tamar's calculated risk-taking and her orchestration of Judah's public admission of guilt, tzadka mimeni, become the mechanism of his moral recovery, though the article stresses that his redemption remains incomplete.

Gevaryahu examines the four occurrences of the cantillation mark shalshelet in the Torah, arguing that in the three Genesis instances (Lot's hesitation, Abraham's servant's prayer, Joseph's refusal of Potiphar's wife) the trope consistently marks a prolonged passage of time, extending an argument he develops for the more puzzling fourth instance in Leviticus 8:23, where he proposes the shalshelet marks the extended, multi-step act of slaughtering the ram of consecration together with its accompanying blood applications. A second section addresses the grammatical relationship between the shalshelet and the following pasek, engaging a recent exchange with Marc B. Shapiro over whether the pasek there functions as a disjunctive trope or simply a breathing mark.

Landau examines the idiom 'ibbaneh mimmenna, 'I will be built from/through her,' used by Sarah and Rachel when offering their maidservants to their husbands, arguing that the traditional Jewish reading — that the wife hopes to become personally able to conceive — is better supported than the modern scholarly consensus (Gunkel, Speiser) that the phrase describes a surrogacy or adoption arrangement modeled on ancient Near Eastern legal texts from Nuzi and the Code of Hammurabi. Marshaling the Akkadian cognate evidence, the parallel use of the same root in Jeremiah 31:4, and close readings of Genesis 16 and 21 that show Sarah never treating Ishmael as her own, he concludes that the idiom expresses a hope for the wife's own fertility, possibly rooted in an original belief in a kind of sympathetic magic.

Adler reports on the 56th International Bible Contest for Jewish Youth (Hidon ha-Tanakh), held in Jerusalem on Israel's 71st Independence Day, which drew roughly eighty contestants from thirty countries — a record turnout. The report covers the speeches of Naftali Bennett, Yitzhak Herzog, and Knesset Speaker Yuli Edelstein, notes the participation of Misgenaw Ayahu representing the Ethiopian Jewish community, and records Yonatan Weissman of Jerusalem as this year's champion, with Benjamin Colchamiro of New Jersey as runner-up.

Zucker reviews Michael Carasik's English edition of the traditional Miqra'ot Gedolot for Genesis, which surrounds the Hebrew text and two JPS translations with the commentaries of Rashi, Rashbam, Ibn Ezra, Radak, Ramban, and other medieval exegetes. He highlights Carasik's method of rewriting rather than literally translating the commentators for readers unfamiliar with Hebrew, illustrating the volume's approach through its treatment of the Binding of Isaac, and concludes that the resulting colloquial accessibility outweighs the loss of a strictly literal rendering.

Horovitz reviews Geula Twersky's Song of Riddles, which argues on structural and thematic grounds that the rabbinic reading of the Song of Songs as an allegory for the relationship between God and Israel can be intellectually upheld, principally by tracing parallels between the Song's imagery and the keruvim of Solomon's Temple. He praises the book's exhaustive and compelling argument, particularly its treatment of the three 'Who is this?' poems as a chronicle of the Ark's journey to the Temple, while cautioning that Twersky sometimes favors her preferred interpretation over other plausible readings, such as her treatment of the word eres in Song of Songs 1:16.