Vol. 49:4

A brief dedication opening the issue, in which Shubert Spero remembers his father, Earl H. Spero (1898-1983), an early congregational song leader (Baal Tefillah) who brought communal singing into Young Israel synagogue services in the United States and who led creative educational projects through the Spero Foundation in the 1950s and 1960s. Spero frames his father's life as an embodiment of the Levitical credo of song and service, a theme that anticipates his own following study of the tribe of Levi in this issue.

Tracing the tribe of Levi from Jacob's deathbed rebuke through the return from Babylonian exile, Spero argues that the violent, zealous impulse the Levites display at Shechem and again at the Golden Calf is progressively rechanneled over the generations into guardianship, administration, teaching, and above all liturgical song. He reads the Levites' appointment at Sinai as filling a vacuum left by the disqualified firstborn, follows their specialization into singers, gatekeepers, and officers under David and at Solomon's Temple, and credits Levitical teachers such as Ezra and Nehemiah's 'mevinim' with cementing Torah study as the tribe's enduring legacy.

Landau examines the fixed biblical 'X and Y' phrase (ha)tov ve(ha)yashar ('the good and the straight'), arguing against reading it as a classical hendiadys or a merism and instead classifying it, alongside phrases like chanun verachum, as a pair of closely related terms fused into one general idea of what is proper, pleasing, or best. He surveys the nine biblical occurrences of the phrase and its single inverted appearance in Deuteronomy 6:18, then flags a possible point of contact with the Greek world: Plato's Meno twice pairs orthos ('straight') with eu ('good'), a coincidence Landau suggests is worth further philological investigation alongside the earlier Homer-Philistines parallels noted by Stephen Walter Caesar.

Rashkow situates the biblical Garden of Eden within the wider Ancient Near Eastern genre of 'gardens of the gods' -- lush, well-watered, jewel-adorned precincts guarded against human access -- comparing Eden and Ezekiel's jewel-studded 'garden of God' (Ezek. 28:13) to the Sumerian Jewel Forest of Gilgamesh and to Ugaritic divine geography. She traces the guardian figures who bar entry to these gardens (Humbaba, the Scorpion-people, and the biblical cherubim) and argues that the nine gemstones Ezekiel assigns to Eden overlap strikingly with those on the High Priest's breastplate, suggesting that the biblical writers deliberately matched, and sought to surpass, the splendor of neighboring Near Eastern divine gardens and their attendant deities.

Scolnic reconstructs the coup that ended Athaliah's usurpation of the Davidic throne, focusing on the pivotal moment when the priest Jehoiada arms the captains of the Carian mercenary guard with 'King David's spear' from the Temple armory before revealing the hidden heir Joash to them. He argues that the historical detail of Carian mercenaries -- attested elsewhere in Egyptian and Greek sources as renowned professional soldiers with distinctive weapons -- is plausible for ninth-century Judah, and that the symbolic gesture of handing them David's own weapons was less about their practical use than about signaling that these outsiders were restoring, not seizing, the Davidic line.

Zion and Zucker set Abigail of Maon (I Samuel 25) alongside the unnamed Wise Woman of Abel Beth-maacah (II Samuel 20) as two women who use rhetorical persuasion, rather than trickery or force, to talk a violent leader -- first David, later his general Joab -- out of indiscriminate bloodshed. The authors catalogue seven verbal and structural parallels between the episodes (placement near the end of their books, defense against imminent violence, shared vocabulary, appeals to God, self-motivated action, distancing from the 'rebel' male, and successful one-on-one negotiation) against seven contrasts (youth versus age, speech versus terseness, declared versus tacit loyalty, reward versus none, responsibility taken versus withheld, ambiguous versus clear political standing, and what follows the encounter), concluding that both women exemplify a practical, ethically directed wisdom that Proverbs associates with sound counsel to kings.