Vol. 52:4

Modern scholars generally date the use of letters as numbers (gematria) to the Hellenistic period, assuming Hebrew borrowed the practice from Greek usage. This article argues instead that the Hebrew Bible itself preserves evidence — most persuasively the number 318 in Genesis 14:14 and the numerical value of the name Gad — that ancient Israelites assigned numerical values to letters well before the Hellenistic era. It distinguishes "overt" gematria, where both the number and the lexical unit appear in the text, from "secret" gematria, the modern practice of counting words, letters, or verses to find hidden numbers, and finds the latter far less persuasive when evaluated against the work of Labuschagne, Knohl, Bazak, and Christensen.

Surveying rabbinic, medieval, and modern scholarship on the authorship of Psalms, this article argues that the popular notion of a single "traditional" view — that David wrote every psalm — is a myth contradicted by the Talmud itself, which lists up to ten authors extending as late as Ezra. Reviewing Rabbi Saadiah Gaon, Ibn Gikatilla, Ibn Ezra, and Malbim, the author shows that classical Jewish sources readily accommodate composition and editing of Psalms throughout the biblical period, dissolving the supposed conflict between religious tradition and modern text-critical evidence such as the postexilic setting of Psalm 137.

Comparing the biblical book of Lamentations to the earlier Sumerian City Laments mourning the fall of Ur and other cities, this article traces shared images — a lonely, grieving female figure who speaks for the city, the absence of musicians, potsherds as a metaphor for the dead, foxes in the ruins — while highlighting a decisive theological difference. Where the Sumerian laments attribute destruction to inscrutable divine fate or overpopulation, unrelated to human deeds, Lamentations frames the fall of Jerusalem as covenantal retribution for Judah's sin, and closes with a plea for reconciliation rather than a restored temple cult.

The order of biblical books mandated by the Talmud (Baba Batra 14b) differs from the order found in every printed Tanakh today — Isaiah precedes rather than follows Jeremiah and Ezekiel, the five megillot are grouped together, and Job precedes Proverbs. This article traces how chronological reasoning (per Radak, Abarbanel, and Elia Levita) displaced the Talmud's thematic ordering for the Prophets and for Psalms-Job-Proverbs, how liturgical reading order displaced chronology for the megillot, and why Chronicles alone remains out of chronological sequence, closing Tanakh instead of directly preceding Ezra-Nehemiah.

Psalm 19 abruptly shifts, without transition, from praising the heavens to praising the Torah — a structural puzzle this article resolves by reading both halves as celebrating the works of the same indivisible God, the cosmos and the Torah alike. Close attention to the shift from mesaprim to magid in verse 2 shows the psalm directing readers past the heavens' bare testimony toward the more intimate "handiwork" of the atmosphere (rakiah) that sustains life. The article then places the psalm in dialogue with Isaiah 40:27 and with Kant's and Heschel's aesthetics of the sublime, distinguishing an intellectual argument from design from an aesthetic experience of awe before the heavens.

A review of Early Jewish Literature: An Anthology (Brad Embry, Ronald Herms, and Archie T. Wright, eds.; Eerdmans, 2018, two volumes), a comprehensive collection of Second Temple era Jewish writing spanning the Apocrypha, Pseudepigrapha, Dead Sea Scrolls, Philo, and Josephus. The reviewer highlights its value for Tanakh-focused readers — including expansions of biblical narratives, additional Psalms, and the earliest pesharim-style commentary on Scripture — and praises its scholarly introductions, glossaries, and indices as making the material accessible to specialists and newcomers alike.

A review essay on Divine Doppelgängers: YHWH's Ancient Look-Alikes (Collin Cornell, ed.; Eisenbrauns, 2020), a thirteen-contributor volume asking how the Bible's God differs from the many Ancient Near Eastern deities He resembles in description and role. Surveying the comparative, theological, and "manmade revelation" approaches offered by contributors including Miller, Strawn, Goldenberg, Levenson, Keel, Becking, and Cornell himself, the reviewer — writing as an Orthodox Jew — finds most unsatisfying and instead proposes a traditionalist resolution rooted in the rabbinic idea of an original Urmonotheismus, later balkanized into paganism, of which biblical and pagan literature both preserve fragmentary echoes.