Vol. 50:2

A survey, not an evaluation, of the major methods that have shaped academic biblical criticism from the twentieth century to today. The article moves from source, historical, form, and redaction criticism through structuralism and reader-response theory to the poststructuralist turn — intertextuality, deconstruction, and the ideological criticisms (feminist, postcolonial, Marxist) — and closes with psychological approaches to text, character, and reader. Throughout, the piece situates each method's questions and limits rather than adjudicating between them.

Chronicles' cryptic notice that Bithiah, daughter of Pharaoh, married Mered of the tribe of Judah has usually been read either as pure midrash or, following Richard Steiner, as a memory of an otherwise unattested thirteenth-century Ramessid princess. This article argues instead, on the strength of the biblical chronology's mid-fifteenth-century Exodus and recent archaeological redatings (Mount Eval, El-Ahwat), that Bithiah is plausibly identifiable with Neferubity, the vanished daughter of Thutmose I and sister of Hatshepsut — and that the medieval commentators' readings of I Chronicles 4:18 support taking the verse's historical claim seriously rather than dissolving it into homily.

The Torah reports the deaths of its major characters in four distinct idioms — "gathered to his kin," "died," "died there," or not at all — and this article argues that the choice among them is never random. Grouping the patriarchs with Ishmael, contrasting the matriarchs' fates with the conspicuously unrecorded deaths of Rebecca, Leah, and Esau, and reading Moses, Aaron, and Miriam's identical "died there" against the liturgy of Deuteronomy 26:5, the piece shows how the Torah's death formulas quietly rank and relate its protagonists to one another.

The confrontation in Jeremiah 28, in which Hananiah breaks the yoke symbolizing Judah's submission to Babylon, has long been read as the Bible's central test case for distinguishing true from false prophecy. Engaging Buber, Carroll, Néher, and especially Heschel's concept of prophetic pathos, this article argues that the usual rigid binaries — true/false, God/human, patriotism/treason — misdescribe the encounter. What separates Jeremiah from Hananiah is not a formal criterion but pathos: an emotional, historically attuned engagement with what God actually wants, which Hananiah's static, precedent-bound thinking lacks.

A memorial tribute to the Israeli archaeologist Adam Zertal (1936–2015), occasioned by the posthumous English translation of his Sisera's Secret. Sivan traces Zertal's path from wounded Yom Kippur War veteran to controversial excavator of Mount Eval and El-Ahwat, and revisits his own earlier JBQ article on Haroshet Ha-Goyyim in light of Zertal's identification of Sisera's cavalry base with El-Ahwat and its Shardana Sea Peoples inhabitants — arguing that the archaeological case for locating the site in northwestern Samaria, rather than the Mount Carmel region, is now considerably stronger.

Exodus 30:11-16 requires a half-shekel 'ransom' from every census-taker to avert a negef, and Rashi explains the danger as the evil eye activated by counting large numbers. This article argues that the traditional 'evil eye' reading cannot be sustained for the Sinaitic period, and that the census, its half-shekel donation, and its restriction to men twenty and older are better explained as a military stratagem: a way to keep track of available fighting men while concealing troop strength from a watching enemy, paralleling the language of Numbers 31 in the aftermath of the Midianite war.