Vol. 51:4

Examines how the fifteenth-century Lisbon exegete R. Joseph Hayyun engaged, both directly and through implication, with Christian interpretations of Jeremiah in a period marked by disputations such as Tortosa and mounting pressure on Iberian Jewry. Kapah shows that Hayyun rarely confronts Christological readings head-on — doing so only twice, on Jeremiah 23:6 and 23:38 — preferring instead an indirect strategy of insisting on the Torah's permanence, rejecting divine materiality, and affirming that the exile and its promised redemption remain future events. The article situates Hayyun within a broader tradition, alongside Rashi and Kimhi, of Jewish commentators who used adherence to the plain sense of Scripture as a quiet rebuttal of allegorical Christian exegesis.

Traces the recurring biblical motif of characters who look — or are looked at — through a window, contrasting the passive, socially confined gaze of elite women such as Sisera's mother, Michal, and Jezebel with the active agency of Rahab, who uses her window to save herself and the Israelite spies. Reads Abimelech's glimpse of Isaac and Rebekah, and Daniel's enemies spying on him at prayer, as parallel male-authored scenes in which looking through a window yields enlightenment rather than confinement. Argues that the gendered asymmetry of the motif — women observed and immobilized, men empowered by what they see — runs through Genesis, Judges, Samuel, and Kings alike, with Rahab standing as the exception that proves the rule.

Argues, against the popular legend that Enoch and Elijah ascended bodily to heaven, that both biblical accounts originally described ordinary deaths whose euphemistic language — 'he was not' and 'God took him' for Enoch, disappearance in a whirlwind for Elijah — later gave rise to apocalyptic and rabbinic traditions of literal ascension. Draws on Genesis Rabbah, Targumic renderings, and the Mesopotamian Enmeduranki tradition to show how Enoch's story was reshaped by later Jewish and Christian apocalyptic literature into the Enoch/Metatron mythology, while Elijah's ascent became bound up with messianic expectation. Concludes that by the Talmudic period the belief that mortals could ascend to heaven had become fully naturalized despite the ambiguity of the original texts.

A brief homiletical reading of Psalm 120, written in the aftermath of October 7, 2023, that reads the psalm's opening plea for rescue from 'treacherous lips' and 'a deceitful tongue' as a meditation on how deceptive speech precedes and enables violence. Compares the psalm's imagery of arrows and hot coals to similar figures elsewhere in the Psalter, and reads the speaker's exile among 'those who hate peace' as an image of living amid enemies whose worldview is fundamentally hostile to peace. Closes by urging readers to hold onto the psalm's opening confidence that God answers those who call to Him in distress.

Reconsiders the assassination of Gedaliah and the subsequent massacre of eighty pilgrims by Ishmael ben Nethaniah (Jer. 41), arguing against the common view that Ishmael sought the Judean throne; Scolnic proposes instead that he was acting as an agent of Baalis, king of Ammon, seeking to prevent any restoration of Judean power and its Temple center. The article also revisits the pilgrims' self-gashing, disputing Brian Schmidt's claim that the practice was permitted before a late, post-Jeremianic prohibition; Scolnic argues the biblical prohibition (Lev. 19, 21; Deut. 14) is early, and that these particular pilgrims — from the northern towns of Shechem, Shiloh, and Samaria — may reflect surviving Canaanite mourning customs rather than normative Judean practice.

Investigates the identity of the tinshemet, an animal named twice in Leviticus 11 — once among forbidden birds, once among forbidden crawling creatures — through the lens of the Talmudic gloss that both are 'ba'ut.' Tracing manuscript variants, Aramaic Targum renderings, and the etymological link to the Hebrew root for breathing, Raanan argues that the bird-tinshemet is best identified as an owl and the vermin-tinshemet as the blind mole-rat, both nocturnal, breath-marked creatures of darkness. The article weighs classical sources (Rashi, Onkelos, Targum Pseudo-Jonathan) against the divergent identifications of the Septuagint and Vulgate.

Surveys three rabbinic strategies for functionally neutralizing the Torah's command to annihilate Amalek without confronting its ethical difficulty head-on: the claim that Amalek can no longer be identified after Sennacherib's population transfers, the view that the command applies only in messianic times once a king is installed, and the position that Amalek has already been wiped out. Ron draws a structural parallel to the Talmud's treatment of the 'stubborn and rebellious son,' where impossible legal conditions render a harsh law purely theoretical, and closes by noting the modern homiletical use of 'Amalek' for enemies like the Nazis that leaves the underlying legal question unresolved.

A brief report on the 60th International Bible Contest for Jewish Youth, held in Jerusalem on Israel's Independence Day and sponsored by Israel's Ministry of Education, the Jewish Agency, and Keren Kayemet, with the Jewish Bible Association as an affiliate sponsor. Notes that for the first time in seventeen years both finalists were Israeli girls, Emuna Cohen (winner) and Neta Lax (runner-up), and describes the ceremony at which Prime Minister Netanyahu and other officials presented the prizes.

Reviews the revised and expanded fourth edition of Emanuel Tov's Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible, describing how the new edition streamlines the theoretical apparatus of earlier versions in favor of a more practical handbook built around tables, annotated sample texts, and exercises. Zucker walks through the volume's two-part structure — the textual witnesses (the Masoretic Text, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the ancient versions) and the practice of textual criticism itself — and highlights its expanded discussion of digital editions of the Hebrew Bible.

Reviews David Curwin's Kohelet: A Map to Eden, which applies Rabbi David Fohrman's keyword-based intertextual method to argue that Ecclesiastes encodes a hidden narrative connecting Solomon's own spiritual decline to Adam's expulsion from Eden and Israel's failure with the spies. Klein highlights Curwin's reading of the refrain hevel as an echo of Abel's name, making Kohelet's laments a kind of mourning voiced through Adam, and praises the book's non-linear, keyword-driven method as an accessible entry into a notoriously enigmatic biblical book.