Vol. 51:1

Rashi's midrash links Jacob's revived spirit at the sight of Joseph's wagons ('agalot) to the laws of the eglah arufah, the heifer whose neck is broken to atone for an unsolved murder. This article traces how medieval commentators from Rashbam to the Maharal explain that connection, and argues that the deeper link lies in shared guilt: just as the elders of a city bear responsibility for a traveler killed after leaving without an escort, Jacob may have felt responsible for sending Joseph unescorted to his brothers. Reading Jacob's later statement 'alai hayu khulanah with the sense of 'on my account' rather than 'upon me,' the author suggests that Jacob's revived spirit reflects not only relief that Joseph lives, but the realization that Joseph's survival exonerates him of guilt for having sent his son into danger.

Although I Chronicles 6 traces Samuel's lineage to Levi, I Samuel 1:1 identifies him as an Ephraimite, and this article argues that the Chronicler's genealogy is an artificial construction meant to glorify the tribe of Levi rather than a historical record. Surveying Samuel's activities at Shiloh, Mizpah, Gilgal, and Ramah, the author shows that building altars, offering sacrifices, blessing meals, and interceding in prayer were not exclusive priestly prerogatives, and were also performed by kings, elders, and prophets such as Elijah and Joshua. The article concludes that Samuel served as a temple attendant (na'ar) under Eli rather than as a priest, and that his true legacy — confirmed by the failure of the prophecy in I Samuel 2:35 to apply to him — was as Israel's prophet, not its priest.

Reading I Samuel 1-2 on its own terms, this article argues that the Hannah narrative offers a positive feminist perspective centuries before the concept existed, contrasting Hannah's spiritual clarity with the limited understanding shown by both her husband Elkanah and the priest Eli. The author traces how Hannah's silent prayer, her vow, her naming of Samuel, and her control over when he enters temple service all demonstrate a woman directing her own destiny rather than being merely a vessel for reproduction. Addressing the scholarly consensus that Hannah's song in I Samuel 2:1-10 is a secondary interpolation — given its military imagery and reference to a future king — the article contends that regardless of the poem's origin, the text's attribution of it to Hannah makes a deliberate claim: a woman can pray with power and be answered by God.

This article surveys the laws governing female slaves in ancient Israel, arguing that they represent a compromise between property law, which treated the slave as chattel, and family law, which recognized her personhood and reproductive role. Comparing biblical statutes on the sold daughter (Exodus 21:7-11), the captive bride (Deuteronomy 21:10-14), and concubinage with parallel provisions in the Laws of Hammurabi, Ur-Nammu, and the Hittite laws, the author shows that biblical law extended female slaves protections — rights to food, clothing, and conjugal relations, restrictions on resale, and a right of redemption — largely unparalleled in neighboring legal systems. The article concludes that while far from egalitarian, biblical law resisted treating the female slave purely as property, affording her a measure of humanity absent from comparable Near Eastern codes.

Psalm 29 is recited in three distinct liturgical settings — the weekly return of the Torah to the ark, Kabbalat Shabbat, and the festival of Sukkot — and this article argues that each setting reflects a different medieval interpretation of the psalm's ambiguous imagery of voice, fire, and water. Rashi, following the Talmud, reads the psalm as a commemoration of the giving of the Torah at Sinai; Ibn Ezra reads it as a description of a literal storm; and Radak reads it as a vision of messianic redemption, a reading reinforced by the psalm's parallels to the messianic Psalms 95-99. The article concludes that the choice of when to recite an ambiguous biblical text in the liturgy effectively fixes one interpretation of that text, and that reciting Psalm 29 in all three contexts commits worshippers, whether they realize it or not, to holding multiple readings of the same words simultaneously.

This article examines how the story of Judah and Tamar in Genesis 38 was retold by Second Temple-era 'Rewritten Bible' texts — Jubilees, the Testament of Judah, and Pseudo-Philo's Biblical Antiquities — each reshaping the biblical account to fit its own agenda. Jubilees and the Testament of Judah both make Judah's Canaanite wife responsible for the family's troubles and identify Tamar as an Aramean to preserve the purity of Judah's line, but the misogynistic Testament of Judah alone omits Tamar's vindication and casts her as duplicitous. By contrast, Pseudo-Philo's Biblical Antiquities transforms Tamar into a heroine invoked by Moses' father Amram as a model of faith and resistance to intermarriage, so that across most of these retellings, with the exception of the Testament of Judah, an already resourceful biblical Tamar becomes even more triumphant.