Vol. 52:1

The Babylonian Talmud reads three biblical sexual encounters — King David and Bathsheba, Zimri and Cozbi, and Sisera and Jael — as multi-coital, assigning each a precise (and physiologically impossible) number of acts. This article argues that these assertions, however hyperbolic, all serve a single motif: sex as a display of power and dominance, allowing David, Zimri, and Sisera each to reassert a threatened claim to status. It surveys the exegetical bases the Talmud and commentators offer for each count and situates the inflated numbers within the broader rabbinic convention of hyperbolic stock numbers.

A midrashic parable in Yalkut Shimoni compares a provincial man married to a princess — who can never satisfy her because she is accustomed to royal life — to the human soul, which no earthly labor can fully nourish because it originates 'from Above.' Working from a close reading of Ecclesiastes 6:7 that separates the verse's two clauses, the article recovers Rabbi Levi's reading of ha-nefesh as 'the soul' rather than 'appetite,' and argues that this midrash, along with the closing verses of Ecclesiastes, anticipates key emphases of twentieth-century religious existentialism, notably Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik's account of man's irreducible loneliness.

Setting the story of Zelophehad's daughters (Numbers 27 and 36) against inheritance law across the ancient Near East — the Laws of Hammurabi, Lipit Ishtar, the Assyrian Laws, and the Elephantine papyri — this article argues that the Bible's strict patrilineal inheritance rule reflects a clan-based social structure distinct from Israel's more urbanized neighbors. It traces how the daughters' calculated, deferential approach to Moses secured a narrow but real legal innovation: daughters inherit when there are no sons, provided they marry within their father's tribe, and examines rabbinic traditions that cast the sisters as wise, pious interpreters of the law rather than mere petitioners.

Rather than pursue archaeological or naturalistic explanations for Jericho's fall, this article reads Joshua 6 against the disastrous majority report of the scouts in Numbers 13 — a report whose truthful core (large, fortified, unconquerable cities) was distorted into exaggerated, fear-mongering rhetoric that condemned a generation to die in the wilderness. Joshua's insistence on total silence during the seven-day circuit of Jericho, broken only by a single unified shout, is read as a corrective: where the scouts' divided, doubting voices brought catastrophe, the new generation's unanimous, obedient shout brings down the walls, demonstrating that the conquest depends on unity and trust in God rather than military stratagem.

The Torah says almost nothing about the physical form of the Luchot, yet centuries of art — from Michelangelo to the Bnei Akiva logo — have fixed a square or round-topped tablet in the popular imagination. Surveying rabbinic debate over how many commandments each tablet held (five, ten, or twenty), the article develops David Peter's proposal that the Luchot were not flat tablets at all but cylinder seals, a reading that resolves several talmudic puzzles — the mysterious silver rods kept alongside them in the Ark, the tradition that their text was legible in reverse — and reframes the Luchot's function from law code or covenant relic to God's own seal of authority, transferred to Israel at Sinai.

The Talmud's etymologies for the names of the midwives Shifra and Puah (Exodus 1:15-21) associate them with cleaning and comforting newborns, but a comment of R. Meir of Rothenburg links Shifra's name to shfoferet, a tube used rectally to revive infants believed stillborn. This short note argues that the comment preserves a genuine ancient medical technique — overlooked by Julius Preuss's standard survey of biblical and talmudic medicine — that anticipates the recently documented cardiovascular effects of digital rectal stimulation in terminating cardiac arrhythmias.

The Hebrew demonstrative zeh usually does no more than point, but this article collects eighteen biblical passages — from Rebecca's anguished lamah zeh anokhi to Achashverosh's furious mi hu zeh — where zeh instead carries a sharp derogatory or contemptuous charge that standard translations (JPS, Koren, NKJV, NRSV) routinely flatten or miss. Working example by example through Genesis, Exodus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, Samuel, Kings, Hosea, Psalms, Lamentations, and Esther, the article proposes emphatic renderings — 'this no-good fellow,' 'this contemptible people,' 'this scoundrel' — that recover the emotional register the plain demonstrative otherwise obscures.