Vol. 49:1

Reading the haftara pairing of the Judgment of Solomon with the Joseph narrative, this article argues that Solomon consciously modeled his handling of the baby-custody case on Joseph's psychological insight into his brothers, using a staged threat to the child's life to force the two litigants to reveal their true feelings. It offers a close legal and psychological reading of the courtroom exchange — including why Solomon's restatement of the arguments in 3:23 was strategic rather than redundant — and argues that the non-mother's shocking assent to the child's death is best explained as a trauma-driven act of denial and jealousy rather than as pure cruelty or a staged fable.

Arguing against the source-critical consensus that splits the Korah narrative into two originally independent rebellion accounts, this essay contends that the standard list of textual difficulties is far less compelling than usually presented, and that source criticism's easy recourse to redactors and alternative traditions lets almost any theory be sustained. The essay's larger claim is that fixating on authorial strands blinds readers to the chapter's literary art and psychological insight — its verbal echoes, its Buber-style Leitwort patterning around the root edah, and its realistic portrait of how disparate rebel factions find temporary common cause.

Building on Yisrael Rosenson's thesis that the Jehu narrative in II Kings carries a covert critique beneath its overt praise, this article uses inner-biblical interpretation to argue that the account of Ishmael ben Nethaniah's assassination of Gedaliah (Jeremiah 40-41) is deliberately patterned to echo Jehu's rise to power. Five points of contact — deceit, slaughter beside a pit, murder of the innocent, wiping out a remnant, and a grim aftermath — link the two figures, suggesting that the Ishmael story functions as a later, critical commentary on how the Bible wants Jehu's methods to be judged, even as it credits him with eliminating Baal worship.

Coining the term 'lo yada-dissociation syndrome' from Rava's Purim dictum about drinking until one cannot discern Haman from Mordechai, this article argues that nearly every character in Esther — Ahasuerus, Vashti, Haman, Esther, and even the narrator — exhibits a psychological pattern of willed unknowing that lets them avoid confronting uncomfortable realities, from the king's studied ignorance of Esther's Jewish identity to Esther's insulation from Haman's decree. Mordechai alone, whose defining verb throughout the book is 'to know,' stands outside the syndrome, and the essay reads the ritual drunkenness of Purim itself as a deliberate re-enactment of the book's pervasive dissociation from reality.

The mena'anim of David's procession bringing the Ark to Jerusalem (II Samuel 6:5) are the only biblical instrument whose identity remains genuinely unsettled, having been translated across the centuries as sistrums, castanets, rattles, drums, and even trumpets. Weighing the archaeological and etymological evidence, this article argues for Batya Bayer's identification of mena'anim as humble clay rattles, and explains their single biblical appearance — despite abundant archaeological attestation — as a casualty of censorship: the Chronicler's parallel account in I Chronicles 13:8 replaces the folk instrument with priestly silver trumpets, part of a broader effort to distance the Ark's procession from associations with pagan and undignified popular ritual.

Jabez appears in Chronicles only in a brief, unidentified genealogical notice and a two-verse prayer, yet the rabbis made him one of the select few who entered paradise alive. This article traces Jabez from the plain sense of the text — where a name meaning 'pain' is transposed by prayer, echoing the Rachel/Benjamin naming story — through the aggadic tradition that identified him with Otniel and turned him into a Torah scholar whose prayer for a pain-free life was answered because of his selfless teaching. The changing readings of Jabez illustrate how rabbinic interpretation can transform a minor, obscure genealogical figure into a paradigm of a particular virtue.

Reading Jacob's final encounter with Joseph and his grandchildren Ephraim and Manasseh (Genesis 48) as a deliberate act of life review, this article argues that Jacob selectively recollects and reinterprets his own past — the prophecy at Luz, Rachel's death, and the conquest of Shechem — in order to build a legal and emotional case for elevating Joseph's sons to the status of his own children. Jacob's retrospective framing, the article contends, is simultaneously a rectification for Rachel and a calculated, backward-looking exercise of patriarchal authority that shapes the tribal future without ever voicing regret for the favoritism that originally set the Joseph story in motion.

A review of Dan Ornstein's Cain v. Abel: A Jewish Courtroom Drama (JPS/University of Nebraska, 2020), which recasts Genesis 4:1-16 as a modern courtroom proceeding with God, Eve, Adam, and Abel's blood as witnesses and an array of classical and modern commentators giving testimony. The review praises the book's imaginative structure and its supporting study materials, but faults its unexamined assumption that Cain committed murder rather than manslaughter or a killing in self-defense.