Vol. 50:3

A comparative survey of marriage, dowry, inheritance, and divorce law across six Ancient Near Eastern legal traditions — Ur-Nammu, Lipit-Ishtar, Eshnunna, Hammurabi, Middle Assyrian, and Hittite — set alongside the scattered biblical evidence on the same topics. The article argues that while bride-price appears uniformly across the region, biblical law is comparatively silent on dowry and inheritance by daughters, reflecting Israel's clan-based, strictly patrilineal social structure against the more centralized, urban societies of its neighbors. It draws on the Elephantine papyri, Ugaritic marriage texts, and biblical narrative (Jacob and Rachel, Naomi, Job's daughters) to illustrate where practice diverged from or filled gaps in the formal legal record.

An examination of the three biblical references to "eating with the blood" — the prohibition in Leviticus 19:26, the historical incident of Saul's troops in 1 Samuel 14, and the prophetic rebuke in Ezekiel 33:25 — read against medieval Jewish exegesis and comparative Ancient Near Eastern evidence for blood rituals directed at chthonic deities and the spirits of the dead. Following Nahmanides and Maimonides, the article argues that the practice was bound up with divination and with placating underworld powers, and that Saul's soldiers, eating meat where the blood of freshly slaughtered animals had been spilled, were most likely engaged in a rite meant to appease the spirits of the dead and ward off their vengeance.

A critical review of the geo-political, religious, and dynastic theories scholars have proposed to explain the courtiers' assassination of King Amon of Judah in 640 BCE, none of which the biblical text itself supports. Comparing the parallel and pointedly unembellished accounts in II Kings 21 and II Chronicles 33 with the more detailed treatment Chronicles gives other royal assassinations, the article argues that the silence is itself the evidence: the courtiers killed Amon for reasons bound up with their own position and power, not for any cause the Deuteronomic historian would have been eager to report.

Most classical and even rationalist Jewish commentators treated Jonah's three days in the fish as a literal miracle, but a minority tradition, traceable through Ibn Kaspi, Profiat Duran's reading of Maimonides, and later scholars, proposed instead that the episode was a prophetic vision experienced by Jonah rather than an event in observable physical reality. Surveying Ibn Ezra, Ibn Kaspi, and the disputed testimony of Rambam's Guide of the Perplexed, the article argues that commentators reserved the visionary reading for episodes marked by the appearance of an angel or a solitary protagonist, and that Jonah's story — with its cast of sailors, captain, and Ninevites acting independently — did not fit that pattern, which explains why even rationalist exegetes stopped short of calling it a vision outright.

Building on the rabbinic tradition that Moses wrote the Torah, the article traces the recurring biblical term sefer — a written record distinguished not by physical form but by its formal, documentary style — from the "Book of the Covenant" of Exodus 24 through Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy's self-declared sefer superscription, arguing that each book grew as an open, ongoing record kept by Moses as events occurred. It further proposes that Moses composed Genesis, including the primeval history of chapters 1-11, at specific points in his mission when he recognized the Israelites' need to know the God of their ancestors and to understand the rationale for the Sabbath.

Scholars have long noted Egyptian parallels to the Joseph cycle, but have largely overlooked one: the placement of crowns in a corn sack by the birth-goddesses in the fourth tale of the Middle Kingdom Westcar Papyrus, set beside Joseph's repeated placement of silver and a cup in his brothers' sacks in Genesis 42–44. Using Benjamin Sommer's distinction between literary "allusion" and mere "echo," the article works through three ways this connection could reshape a reading of the Joseph story — casting Joseph in a god-like providential role, contrasting the discovery of silver with the goddesses' gift of crowns, and linking the episode to the later promise of kingship through Judah — while concluding that the more likely function of the parallel is the simpler pleasure of an echo rather than a deliberate, meaning-bearing allusion.

A review of Dalit Rom-Shiloni's Voices from the Ruins: Theodicy and the Fall of Jerusalem in the Hebrew Bible (Eerdmans, 2021), which asks how the biblical writers — chiefly Jeremiah and Ezekiel, but also Kings, Lamentations, and a set of lament psalms — reckoned with the destruction of Jerusalem and exile without abandoning belief in a good and omnipotent God. The review highlights Rom-Shiloni's model of theodicy as a many-voiced discourse of justification, doubt, and protest organized around God's roles as king, warrior, and judge, and notes the book's demanding use of Hebrew and its place as a major contribution to the study of sixth-century BCE biblical thought.