Vol. 52:2

Reading Jacob's dream at Bethel (Gen. 28:10-22) against Abraham's earlier altar between Bethel and Ai (Gen. 12-13), this article argues that the two patriarchal encounters with God took place at the very same site, and that Jacob simply did not recognize the spot his grandfather had consecrated a generation before. Against the common critical view that the Bethel story is a late etiology invented to legitimate Jeroboam's rival sanctuary, the author contends that Jeroboam instead exploited a genuinely ancient tradition of Bethel's sanctity — one that archaeology, Genesis, and even Hosea's otherwise scathing critique of the site all attest to. The article traces this thread from Abraham's original altar through Jacob's pillar, Jeroboam's golden calf, and the site's eventual destruction under Josiah.

The prologue of Job (chs. 1-2) uniquely intercuts a heavenly storyline, in which God and the Adversary debate Job's righteousness, with an earthly storyline in which Job's children and livestock are destroyed — a technique the article compares to Hitchcock's parallel-storyline filmmaking, where tension builds toward the moment the two narratives collide. Job's demand for direct revelation, unusual within wisdom literature, pushes him to try to break out of his 'Divine-Silent' story into a 'Divine-Interaction' one, a shift that finally occurs in the epilogue when God speaks openly to Job and his friends. The article argues that this generic collision is the book's central literary strategy, complicating both the comfort offered by Divine-Silent narratives like Ruth and Esther and the comfort offered by Divine-Interaction narratives like the stories of Abraham and Moses.

The Hebrew word tanin is rendered by English translators as serpent, dragon, sea monster, crocodile, and even whale, depending on context — from the rod-turned-serpent of Exodus 7 to the great sea creatures of Genesis 1:21 to Leviathan's companion in Isaiah 27:1. Surveying tanin across Exodus, Genesis, Isaiah, Job, Psalms, and Ezekiel alongside the English word dragon's own shifting history and cognate terms in Ugaritic, Sumerian, and Akkadian, this article argues that the inconsistency of translation reflects a genuine thinness in biblical Hebrew's vocabulary for creatures of the sea and rivers, in contrast to its richer vocabulary for cultic objects. That thinness, the author suggests, says as much about ancient Israel's relative indifference to the sea as it does about any single creature called tanin.

The two midwives who defy Pharaoh's genocidal decree in Exodus 1 are examined both as a test case for recovering women's experience from a text assumed to be written by and for men, and as the Bible's first recorded act of civil disobedience in defense of a moral imperative. The article surveys the long-running debate over whether Shiphrah and Puah were themselves Hebrew or Egyptian — weighing rabbinic identifications of the pair with Jochebed and Miriam against modern arguments, following Francis Nataf, that Pharaoh's mild response to their insubordination and the text's use of 'fearing God' point toward an Egyptian identity — and considers what their reward of 'houses' (Ex. 1:20-21) may have meant. Whatever their origin, the article argues, the midwives' evasive answer to Pharaoh is itself a subtle and sardonic act of resistance.

Against the traditional grammatical consensus that the hitpael conjugation primarily marks reflexive action, this article proposes that it instead marks an active verb performed under some influence — a counter-influence resisting the act, an inner emotion driving it, or the influence of another person — and tests the proposal against ten paired verses (one hitpael, one in another conjugation) describing the same or a parallel act. Cases examined include Adam's hiding after eating the forbidden fruit, the golden calf's donated jewelry, Absalom's plotting brothers, and Rashi's comments on Moses needling Pharaoh over the plague of frogs. The article also offers an alternative to Gesenius's historical explanation of why some verbs of mourning appear in the hitpael and others in the qal, arguing the difference tracks emotional influence rather than the period in which a passage was composed.

The book of Daniel shifts from Hebrew to Aramaic at 2:4 and back to Hebrew at chapter 8, a transition that does not track the book's usual division between the court tales of chapters 1-6 and the visions of chapters 7-12. Following Ibn Ezra and Abarbanel, the article first considers the traditional explanation that the Aramaic sections simply preserve the actual language in which the recorded dialogue and archival records took place, comparable to the Aramaic documents embedded in Ezra-Nehemiah, before turning to Abarbanel's further claim that chapter 7 stays in Aramaic because it is still dated to Babylonian rule while chapter 8 shifts to Hebrew because it marks Babylonia's end. The article then proposes a complementary, more thematic reading: that the shift from Hebrew to Aramaic and back to Hebrew is designed to walk the reader through the experience of exile and redemption, reinforced by the book's three separate mentions of Cyrus at the close of each of its major sections.

Deuteronomy 20:19's prohibition on destroying a besieged city's fruit trees — Are trees of the field human to withdraw before you under siege? — is read alongside ancient Near Eastern siege accounts (Thutmose III at Megiddo, Shalmaneser III against Damascus, Tiglath-Pileser III against Rezin) that describe armies literally felling orchards to build siegeworks, supporting the verse's plain sense as a rhetorical question rather than a comparison of people to trees. The article then asks why the halakhic category of gidulei karka ('something that grows from the ground'), applied to human beings in several talmudic and later sources, is never proved from this verse despite an extensive literature search, when Deuteronomy 20:19 would seem a far more fitting prooftext than the one the Talmud actually uses (Lev. 25:46). The author suggests the Sages preferred the plain, non-metaphorical reading of the verse followed by Rashi, which leaves it without bearing on the gidulei karka question.

A review of The JPS Tanakh: Gender-Sensitive Edition (2023), the first complete gender-sensitive translation of the Hebrew Bible into English, tracing its lineage from the 2006 Contemporary Torah and detailing how the new RJPS renders the tetragrammaton as 'the ETERNAL' rather than 'the LORD' and recasts masculine-generic language such as 'He who fatally strikes a man' as 'One who fatally strikes another.' The review situates the edition's methodology — guided by accessibility, clarity, and authenticity — against the 1985 NJPS it revises, and notes the physical quality of the new volume as a minor disappointment.

A review of the proceedings volume from the Fifteenth International Symposium of Hebrew University's Orion Center for the Study of the Dead Sea Scrolls, covering three areas: Second Temple period scripture (mainly the Dead Sea Scrolls), Greek scripture texts from the Jewish Wars to the early Masoretic codices, and the Vienna Papyrus Collection's roughly 200 Hebrew texts from late antique and medieval Egypt. Highlights singled out include Geoffrey Khan's account of the relationship between the Karaites and the Masoretic tradition, Nancy Benovitz's discussion of a Jewish apotropaic silver amulet, and Alexander Rofe's chapter arguing that the identity of the prophet Malachi may in fact be Haggai, based on a Septuagint interpolation at Malachi 1:1 and the shared title 'the LORD's messenger.'