Vol. 49:3
Eshet Ḥayil (Proverbs 31:10-31) is usually read as a portrait of the ideal wife, but this essay asks what role, if any, the poem leaves for her husband. Surveying the general evidence and then the individual verses in which he is addressed or invoked, the essay weighs a husband-centric reading (in which the wife's virtues exist to serve and enrich him) against a wife-centric reading (in which she is the poem's true protagonist and he is comparatively marginal). It concludes that while the husband retains a public role at the city gates, the poem's structure and language consistently centralize the wife's competence and independence, making her the dominant figure even as she remains within traditionally feminine domestic boundaries.
After Jacob's death, his sons fear that Joseph will finally take revenge on them for selling him into slavery, and approach him through an intermediary rather than face to face. Drawing on midrashic sources alongside the biblical text, this article asks why this brief, seemingly unnecessary encounter (Genesis 50:14-21) needed to be recorded at all, and argues that Joseph's response — reassuring, comforting, and restoring his brothers' sense of their own indispensability — models how a family's most empowered member can take responsibility for the collective future even when he was the one who was wronged.
Alongside the well-known inverted nuns that delineate Numbers 10:35-36, a now mostly forgotten scribal tradition preserved two other unusual letterforms in Torah scrolls: an "inverted ayin" with a small backward-curling tail, and a "bent peh" (or peh leffufa) whose interior resembles an @ sign. Drawing on Sefer Tagin, Sefer haRemazim, Ba'al haTurim, and later halachic authorities, this article traces where these letters appear, what the medieval and early-modern sources say they signify, and why the bent peh — found in roughly two hundred places, chiefly in Yemenite Torah scrolls — became by far the more common of the two forms.
The Hebrew Bible repeatedly forbids consulting ovot and yiddeonim, terms bound up with necromancy and the belief that the spirits of the dead could reveal the future to the living. Surveying the prohibitions in Leviticus and Deuteronomy, the story of Saul at Endor, the practice of leaving food for the dead, and Isaiah 65:4's condemnation of those who sleep among tombs, this article argues that Isaiah's verse preserves traces of incubation — sleeping in a sacred or funerary place to receive a revelatory dream — repurposed as a forbidden form of contact with dead ancestors.
The Book of Ruth is deliberately vague about the precise family relationship of both Boaz and the unnamed go'el to Naomi's deceased husband Elimelekh, suggesting that neither man was biblically obligated to perform levirate marriage. This article argues that Boaz, having fallen in love with Ruth, deliberately baits the go'el into believing that redeeming Elimelekh's field also entails marrying Ruth the Moabitess and thereby permanently associating his own family's name with an intermarriage — a prospect the go'el, unlike the more open-minded Boaz, finds unacceptable. Read this way, the book emerges as a romance in which the true motive for Boaz's pursuit of Ruth is love rather than kinship obligation, paralleling the fusion of the spiritual and the romantic found in Song of Songs.
Against commentators who read Psalm 24 as a conflation of two originally separate liturgies — one for pilgrims ascending to the Temple, one for the Ark's return from battle — this article argues that the psalm is a unified composition mapped onto the Ark's journey in Samuel and Kings, from its capture by the Philistines through its arrival in the City of David. Tracking six resting places of the Ark against six occurrences of God's name and of the root for "to raise" in the psalm, and linking the psalm's language to the Creation account and to Solomon's dedication of the Temple, the article contends that Psalm 24 was composed specifically for, and evokes, the moment David brought the Ark into Zion.
A review of Tyler D. Mayfield's Unto Us a Child is Born: Isaiah, Advent, and Our Jewish Neighbors (Eerdmans, 2020), which asks how Isaiah can be read faithfully as both a Christian Advent text and the Jewish prophet Judaism has always known him to be. The review commends Mayfield's distinction between a Christian "Near Vision" and a historically grounded "Far Vision" of Isaiah's four traditionally messianic passages, while flagging one passage where the book's own language inadvertently "Christianizes" its otherwise careful historical-critical account of Second Isaiah.
A review of Elliott Rabin's The Biblical Hero: Portraits in Nobility and Fallibility (JPS/University of Nebraska, 2020), which examines Moses, Samson, Esther, Abraham, Jacob, and David as biblical heroes and devotes a further chapter to God as a heroic figure. The review highlights Rabin's five consistent messages about biblical heroism and his eclectic use of sources ranging from rabbinic literature to Agatha Christie, while noting as a shortcoming Rabin's continued use of masculine, monarchical language for God even where gender-neutral alternatives were readily available.