Vol. 51:2

Examines the biblical narrative habit of dividing one character's uninterrupted speech into parts by repeating vayo'mer ('he said') with no change of speaker or narratorial comment in between. Working through examples from Genesis and Exodus involving both divine and human speakers, the article tests how source critics (Driver, Noth, Friedman) treat these repetitions against traditional Jewish commentary, and argues that in most cases the repetition functions as a stylistic device — marking a shift in topic, tone, or logical step — rather than as a seam between spliced sources.

Traces the Yom Kippur scapegoat ritual of Leviticus 16 — in which the sins of Israel are transferred onto a live goat sent into the wilderness to Azazel — against comparable 'sending-away' rites from Ebla, Hatti, Ugarit, and Neo-Assyria. Rashkow argues the ritual answers a specific problem the two sacrificial goats cannot solve: intentional sin, unlike impurity, cannot be neutralized on-site and must instead be physically relocated far from the tabernacle. The article closes by tracing how this transference logic dropped out of Yom Kippur observance once the Temple fell and prayer and repentance took its place.

Tackles the notorious crux of ayummah kannidgalot, the phrase describing the beloved in Song of Songs 6:4 and 6:10, surveying the military, astral, and 'sights/visions' readings scholars have proposed for nidgalot and the discomfort many have felt in rendering the same two words differently across the two verses. Drawing on modern linguistic theory about context-dependent meaning, Sears argues that the phrase is not required to mean the same thing twice: the cities of 6:4 prime a martial reading ('awesome as a bannered host'), while the sun-and-moon imagery of 6:10 primes a celestial one, with the first occurrence itself priming the reader for the shift in the second.

Rereads Isaiah 15-16, a lament over Moab's suffering unusual among Isaiah's oracles against foreign nations for its sympathy rather than gloating, and surveys the wide range of proposed historical settings scholars have assigned it, from the ninth century to the Hasmonean period. Scolnic argues that the specificity of place names and the freedom of movement the text describes fit a natural disaster — an earthquake or drought in the geologically volatile Dead Sea region — better than a military invasion, which makes Isaiah's plea for Judah to shelter Moabite refugees a call grounded in compassion rather than conquest. The article situates that plea within the Bible's longer, ambivalent history of Israelite-Moabite relations, from Lot and Ruth to the Mesha stele.

Investigates the hapax legomenon tzantrot in Zechariah's menorah vision (4:12), which supplies the oil channel connecting the two olive trees to the lamp and, by extension, stands in for the 'two sons of the anointed ones' — Joshua the high priest and Zerubavel. Ron lays out three competing identifications (a pipe or vessel, human olive pressers, or Persian-derived mythological beings) and shows how each carries a different theological claim about how much agency Second Temple leaders had in a divine project traditionally described as happening 'not with valor and not with strength, but with My spirit.'

Reconsiders the four species of Sukkot — lulav, etrog, hadas and arava — starting from an anomaly traditional harvest-festival readings can't explain: none of the four bears edible fruit. Tracing the word hadar and its cognates through military, majestic, and water-in-the-desert contexts across the Torah, Prophets and Psalms, Twersky argues the four species function as a symbolic set of disarmed war implements, paraded to credit God rather than human strength for victory — a reading corroborated by Bar Kokhba's wartime letters requesting citrons and palm branches for his troops, and by the prophetic image of swords beaten into plowshares.

Compares how the three Aramaic Targumim to the Torah — Onqelos, Neofiti, and Pseudo-Jonathan — render the Tamar-Judah narrative of Genesis 38, from small euphemistic substitutions (translating 'Canaanite' as 'merchant,' 'prostitute' as 'one who goes out') to Neofiti's and Pseudo-Jonathan's substantially expanded scene at the burning, in which Tamar prays for her three pledges and a heavenly voice exonerates her and Judah. Zucker argues that across these expansions the Targumim consistently reshape Tamar from the Bible's quick-witted, tenacious figure into a resourceful, restrained, and explicitly vindicated heroine — 'Tamar triumphant.'