Vol. 51:3

A philological investigation of the obscure Hebrew word omen in Moses' complaint at Numbers 11:12, where he asks whether he must carry the people 'as an omen carries an infant.' Surveying translations and commentators from the Septuagint through modern scholarship — nurse, foster father, nursing father, nursing-parent, educator, and wet-nurse's husband — the article shows that each rendering runs into difficulty, and argues on the strength of the sevenfold repetition of the root nasa ('to carry') in Numbers 11:11-17 that omen denotes not a nurse but a child's primary male caregiver, a meaning that also clarifies the word's later uses for Mordecai and for the kings of Isaiah's vision.

A survey of health, illness, and healing in the Hebrew Bible, framed by the covenantal claim of Exodus 15:26 that God alone is Israel's healer. The article traces biblical prayers for the sick, the ambivalent rabbinic and biblical attitude toward human physicians, the Bible's treatments for wounds and illness against the backdrop of Ancient Near Eastern magic and medicine, and the theology of fertility and barrenness, arguing that all of these threads return to the same premise: that health is a mitzvah bound up with Israel's relationship to God.

The biblical word saf oscillates between two apparently unrelated meanings, 'threshold' and 'basin' or 'vessel,' a duality already registered in the Tannaitic dispute between R. Yishmael and R. Akiva over the blood of the Paschal offering in Exodus 12:22. Tracing the same ambiguity through the guards of the saf in Esther 2:21, the article argues that commentators who chose the rarer 'vessel' meaning were not simply parsing philology but pursuing exegetical payoffs — aligning the Exodus sacrifice with later Israelite ritual, or strengthening the narrative parallels between Esther and the Joseph story — even though the Akkadian cognate sippu and the balance of biblical usage favor 'threshold' as the primary sense.

King Ahaz's altar, copied from a model he saw in Damascus and installed in the Jerusalem Temple in II Kings 16, has long been read either as a straightforward act of pagan syncretism or, on a more sympathetic reading, as a legitimate act of devotion to the LORD conducted in traditional sacrificial form. Weighing the traditional cultic detail of the II Kings account, the silence of Isaiah and Chronicles about the altar itself, and the compliance of the priest Uriah against the negative Deuteronomistic and Chronistic portraits of Ahaz, the article argues that Ahaz is best understood not as a straightforward idolater but as a 'monarchical polytheist' — a king whose flexible, politically motivated religious practice combined traditional YHWH worship with tolerance of other cults.

An examination of Miriam and Aaron's slander of Moses over 'the Cushite woman' in Numbers 12, tracing the classical midrashic reading (that the phrase is a euphemism for Moses' celibate separation from Zipporah) against the more literalist readings of Rashbam and R. Joseph Bechor Shor, and Ibn Caspi's sharp objection that the midrash smuggles in a Christian-monastic ideal of celibacy foreign to Judaism. Drawing on Adiel Schremer's argument that the midrash was in fact composed to polemicize against Christian celibacy rather than to endorse it, the article concludes that the episode's real lesson is not the virtue of abstinence but the humility God praises in Moses, who alone among the prophets was commanded to separate from his wife.

David Berger called Don Isaac Abarbanel's reading of Psalm 50 as a prophetic rebuke of Christian doctrine 'stunning' and traced it to the late fifteenth century. This article shows the anti-Christian reading is considerably older: Radak, in the early thirteenth century, already attributes an anonymous elderly scholar's identification of Psalm 50:21 with the doctrine of incarnation, and the Talmud's discussion of the death of Yeishu's disciples in Sanhedrin 43b appears to presuppose the same association centuries earlier still. The article surveys the Psalm's content, its unusual triple divine names and 'son of your mother' phrasing, and the layered history of a reading that is simultaneously theological exegesis and Jewish-Christian polemic.

Geula Twersky on the poetry set at the Torah's critical moments, and what its devices are doing there. The reviewer takes the book's claim seriously: that Torah poetry is a loosely connected network of meditations linking the five books, on God's sovereignty and Israel's role as keepers of the covenant.

On Ilona Rashkow's article about the Azazel ritual in JBQ 51:2. Asks whether any neighbouring culture selected its scapegoat by lot as the Bible does, and takes up her reading of the high priest laying both hands on the goat — not only "this is mine" but "this is me" — against the writer's own earlier suggestion that the two goats stand for two components of human consciousness.