Vol. 48:4

Rachel tells Jacob that Bilhah 'will give birth on my knees/lap' so that she too will be 'built' through her handmaid (Genesis 30:3). Surveying traditional Jewish commentary, Hittite-Hurrian birth myths, and comparative Near Eastern adoption texts, the author argues against the popular view that placing a newborn on someone's knees was a legal adoption ceremony. Building on the parallel phrase in Genesis 50:23, he proposes instead that the idiom means simply 'in my presence,' so that the handmaid's childbirth functions as an extension of the wife herself rather than a formal rite of legitimation.

Rabbinic sources describe milk (chalav) as capable of intoxicating a person to the point of disqualifying a kohen from Temple service or a sage from issuing halachic rulings, yet modern science finds no basis for milk as a soporific or intoxicant. Marshaling talmudic, midrashic, and targumic evidence — including the etymological link between chalav and chelbon (white wine) — the author argues that the 'milk' in these legal contexts, and possibly the milk Yael gives Sisera in Judges 4, actually refers to white date wine rather than animal milk.

Although consulting the dead is forbidden by biblical law, the woman who raises Samuel's spirit for Saul in I Samuel 28 is portrayed with surprising sympathy rather than condemnation. The author traces this sympathetic portrayal, and the parallel tragic depiction of Saul, through two ancient retellings — Josephus' Judean Antiquities and the pseudepigraphic Biblical Antiquities (Pseudo-Philo) — and surveys how modern Bible translations differ in labeling her a medium, necromancer, or witch.

Psalm 92's superscription assigns it to Shabbat, yet the psalm itself contains little explicit Sabbath language, a puzzle scholars have long tried to resolve. The author argues that the psalm's themes of victory, divine enthronement, Temple, and creation made it appropriate for Levitical performance on Shabbat, drawing on ancient Near Eastern enthronement-and-temple-building patterns and proposing that Psalm 92 may have been performed liturgically alongside the Genesis 1:1-2:3 creation account.

The Masoretic Text's defective and plene (full) spellings are generally considered by modern scholars to follow no consistent system, yet rabbinic literature repeatedly treats these variations as meaningful. The author surveys the dominant rabbinic approach — that a defective spelling signals some deficiency in what it describes — and tests it against the recurring word ha-gadol across the Torah, showing that while the methodology is not perfectly uniform, it operates as an implicit and recoverable exegetical principle in the Talmud, midrash, and medieval commentators.

Deuteronomy 6:5's declaration that 'the Lord is One' seems at odds with Rashi's reading of the Sh'ma as a future promise — that God will become one only when all nations recognize Him. Drawing on Ramban, Zephaniah, Zechariah, and R. Moshe Chaim Luzzatto's distinction between God's unity and His other attributes, the author argues that God's singularity includes an aspect of exclusive sovereignty that remains unrealized so long as humanity worships other values, so that the Sh'ma functions as a personal commitment to a still-unfolding messianic unity rather than merely a static metaphysical claim.

A review of Joshua Berman's Ani Maamin (Maggid Books, 2020), a lay synthesis of Berman's earlier scholarship arguing that the Bible should be read within its Ancient Near Eastern literary context rather than through the Documentary Hypothesis. The review traces Berman's 'exhortative' reading of biblical narrative and law, his comparison of Deuteronomy to Near Eastern vassal treaties, and the book's largely disconnected second half on the historical origins of Maimonides' Thirteen Principles of Faith.