Vol. 48:2

Richter argues that the Isaac saga of Genesis 25-26 has been disordered in transmission, and proposes a reconstructed chronology in which Isaac and Rebekah move to Gerar, prosper, are expelled to the Wadi of Gerar and then Rehoboth, and only afterward move to Beersheba, where Rebekah's barrenness is resolved and the twins are conceived. Along the way he reads the two theophanies of Genesis 26 as complementary rather than redundant, and reinterprets ahuzzath mere'ehu in the Abimelech covenant not as a councilor's name but as a land deed, paralleling the ahuzzah motifs attached to all three patriarchs. Extensive appendices display the type-scenes of the Isaac saga and align its wife-sister episode with the parallel Abraham narratives in Genesis 12-13 and 20-21.

The Talmud lists the Messiah's name among seven things that preceded the creation of the world, citing Psalm 72:17 (Yinon) as its proof text — even though Psalm 72 is on its plain sense a psalm about Solomon, with no explicit messianic content. Jaffe argues that the Midrash's true, unstated source is Micah 5:1, which explicitly places the Messiah's origin kedem, from ancient times, and that later tradition substituted Psalm 72 for polemical reasons: associating the Messiah's birthplace with Bethlehem, as Micah 5:1 does, risked being read as corroborating Christian claims about Jesus. The article situates this substitution within a broader pattern in which Midrashim cite one biblical verse while actually being inspired by another, unstated one.

Apple examines the opening verses of Psalm 116, part of Hallel, and the syntactic puzzle of ahavti ki yishma Ado-nai et koli tahannunai — is the psalmist saying he loves God, or that he loves it when God hears his plea? Surveying Rashi, Ibn Ezra, and modern theologians (Rosenzweig, Kaplan, Baeck), Apple distinguishes love of God that is t'luyyah b'davar, dependent on God's responsiveness, from a rarer 'pure' love attested elsewhere in the Psalter that exists independent of any visible cause. He concludes that Psalm 116 depicts a conditional love — the psalmist loves God because God hears him — while gesturing, through Luzzatto, toward the ideal of loving God unconditionally, whether or not one's plea is answered.

The phrase levad mimkarav al ha-avot in Deuteronomy 18:8 is, by one commentator's description, among the hardest passages in the Torah to interpret. Cohen surveys the Talmudic reading (an anachronistic reference to the priestly duty-rotas established under David), and the rival literalist readings of Rashbam (a family acquaintance sharing sacrificial meat) and Ibn Ezra (proceeds of an inherited house sale), and finds all three wanting on grammatical or contextual grounds. He proposes instead that the unvocalized consonants were originally read as levad mimakarav al ha'ovot — excepting those recognized as practitioners of necromancy — arguing that this reading coheres with the immediately following prohibition of sorcery and divination in Deuteronomy 18:9-11 and better explains why a purity requirement would attach to a priest's approach to the altar.

Genesis credits Cain's line with founding the first city and, through Lamech's children, with pioneering herding, music, and metallurgy — an odd inheritance for the Bible's first murderer. Following Abarbanel, Spero reads this cluster of inventions as the fruit of Cain's remorse: having lost his place as a tiller of the soil, Cain becomes a builder of cities, and his descendants, driven to make amends, transform violence and humiliation into cultural creativity. Spero gives particular attention to music's inclusion among humanity's foundational achievements, arguing that song functions as the language of emotion which lets even the vilest sinner, following the model of Cain's own repentance, discharge anger and burst into praise.

Building on R. Soloveitchik's account of the Torah's cosmic and covenantal narrations of Creation, Taler and Wolowelsky develop 'Polyphonic Narration' as a technique whereby the Bible presents two competing versions of the same event almost simultaneously, each interrupting the other, rather than consecutively. They apply this method to two well-known cases of textual duplication: the parting of the Red Sea in Exodus 14, where an 'intended' natural-seeming outcome and an 'actual' miraculous outcome are interleaved, and the Givonite treaty of Joshua 9, where the people's and the chieftains' version of events runs alongside Joshua's own. Reading the repetitions and contradictions long noted by commentators as evidence of two interwoven narrators, rather than as textual corruption, resolves several classic exegetical difficulties in both chapters.

Nimrod, described in Genesis 10:9 as 'a mighty hunter before the Lord,' becomes in rabbinic tradition the Bible's archetypal negative leader — a byword for rebellion, deception, and rule by force, later fused with the builder of Babel and with Abraham's antagonist. Beck traces this legend through Rashi, Abarbanel, Rabbi Akiva, and Samson Raphael Hirsch to construct a negative model of kingship built entirely by contrast with Abraham's open tent and voluntary submission, and follows Nimrod to his traditional violent end — first at Babel, where his own linguistic confusion mirrors his abuse of power, and finally at the hands of Esau, who covets and kills for the very garment that had given Nimrod his dominion over the animals.