Vol. 48:3

A close reading of Genesis 37 argues that the Joseph story is, at its core, a story about the family's failure to communicate. Greenberger traces how Joseph's tattling, Jacob's silent favoritism, and the brothers' refusal to confront Joseph directly compound into the sale into slavery, and reads the chapter's three 'meltdowns' as variations on a single theme: unspoken assumptions and withheld words, rather than any single act, tear the house of Jacob apart.

Traditional Judaism treats Ezra and Nehemiah as a single book, and the Talmud explains that Nehemiah was denied a book named for him as punishment for a prideful tone in his memoir. Ron traces how the division into two books, and the naming of the second as 'Nehemiah,' originated with Origen and the Christian textual tradition and only entered printed Hebrew Bibles through Daniel Bomberg's sixteenth-century editions — and how later rabbinic figures, notably the Chida, came to read this originally Christian innovation as divinely sanctioned rehabilitation of Nehemiah's reputation.

Responding to Marc Zvi Brettler's essay arguing that Psalm 113 preserves an otherwise-absent woman's liturgical voice marking childbirth, Apple contends that the psalm's concern is theological rather than gendered — God's power to raise up both the poor (vv. 7-8) and the barren woman (v. 9) alike. Apple surveys rabbinic identifications of the 'happy mother of children' (Sarah, Hannah, Yokheved, the mother of the seven martyred sons, the nation of Israel) and argues, via the construct grammar of aqeret ha-bayit, that the verse is not primarily about female voice at all.

Friedmann reads Joshua 6's account of the shofar blasts that topple Jericho's walls as an earthquake myth of a familiar cross-cultural type — like the earthquake-causing catfish of Japan or the elephants of Hindu mythology — in which a culturally specific object explains a seismic event. Because the shofar was already bound up with theophany, warfare, and Israelite ceremony, the Jericho narrative channels the shofar's divinely infused sonic power into the collapse of the walls, distinguishing it from other earthquake myths by giving human beings, through the priesthood, some agency over the trembling earth.

The genealogy interrupting the exodus narrative in Exodus 6:14-28 nominally introduces Moses and Aaron, yet lists only Aaron's marriages, sons, and grandson Phinehas — Moses's own wife and children go unmentioned. Nataf argues that this asymmetry is deliberate: the genealogy belongs entirely to Aaron, not Moses, which is why it names Aaron before Moses uniquely at its close (6:26). He proposes that Aaron's hereditary priesthood, or Aaron's role as the family-continuity counterweight to Moses's singular prophetic vocation, explains why the text tracks Aaron's line rather than his brother's.

Rejecting readings of the Akedah as atonement for Abraham's expulsion of Ishmael, as Abraham's atonement for doubting God in Genesis 15, or as a foundational covenant-moment per Levenson and Blumenthal, Scolnic traces Abraham and Sarah's repeated skepticism and mockery of God's promise of a miraculous heir across Genesis 15-21. He argues that God commands the sacrifice of Isaac not to test Abraham's ethics or love, but to force Abraham to fully internalize — after a pattern of doubt, laughter, and improvised solutions like Hagar — that God alone is the Master of Life, the sole author of fertility and covenantal continuity.

Genesis 46:27 counts seventy members of Jacob's family who descended to Egypt, but the sub-totals for each of Jacob's wives, especially Leah's thirty-three, do not add up cleanly against the names actually listed. Gollub surveys the classical solutions — that the missing member is Jochebed, conceived en route and born in Egypt (per TB Baba Batra 123b), or that Jacob himself is the seventieth person (per Ibn Ezra) — and proposes an alternative: that Dinah is excluded from the count because, unlike Serach bat Asher, she is never singled out elsewhere in the Bible as a notable figure in her own right.

A review of Sandra E. Rapoport's 500-page novel elaborating on the book of Esther, which Zucker calls 'the world's longest Purim spiel.' Reading the novel against Adele Berlin's characterization of the biblical Esther as farce and Lillian Klein's account of its politics of honor and shame, Zucker finds Rapoport's caricatured villains and secretive Jewish 'Sanhedrin Brotherhood' entertaining but worries the melodrama risks reinforcing, rather than satirizing, contemporary antisemitic tropes about Jewish power and disloyalty.

A review of Alec Goldstein's A Theology of Holiness (Kodesh Press, 2018), which pursues the meaning of kedushah first through etymology and biblical antonyms (hillel, tamei), then through a thematic survey of holy places, times, and persons, and finally through philosophical readings ranging from Nahmanides and Maimonides to Kant and Rudolf Otto. Klein finds the book erudite and wide-ranging but notes it deliberately offers no single settled definition of holiness, leaving readers with a kaleidoscope of views rather than a conclusion.