Vol. 53:1

Katzoff examines the tension between Joseph's insistence that God, not his brothers, sent him to Egypt and the reader's intuition that the brothers are morally culpable for selling him into slavery. Drawing on Harry Frankfurt's Principle of Alternate Possibilities and the example of the counterfactual intervener 'Black,' she argues that the sale was rendered inevitable by God's providential design without being directly caused by God, so the brothers remain blameworthy even though they could not have avoided it. The article traces this inevitability through the narrative of Genesis 37, beginning at the point Joseph sets out for Dothan, and situates the reading within the classical rabbinic principle of 'dual causality' governing biblical narrative.

Building on prior scholarship connecting the books of Samuel and Esther, Yap argues that Mordecai is constructed as a positive antithesis to King Saul through two recurring literary motifs: clothing and food. In Samuel, Saul progressively loses his garments and mishandles food (sparing Agag, imposing a self-defeating fast, feasting with the necromancer at Endor) as markers of his decline, while in Esther, Mordecai moves from sackcloth to royal robes and uses fasting to distinguish the Jews from their enemies rather than to seal his own downfall. The article traces the two motifs scene by scene across both books to show that where Saul's story ends in stripped armor and death, Mordecai's ends in royal apparel and civic celebration.

Rashkow reads the rape of Dinah and the subsequent slaughter at Shechem in Genesis 34 against Ancient Near Eastern rape and vengeance law, including the Middle Assyrian Laws, Hittite Laws, and Deuteronomy 22. She argues on grammatical grounds — the shift from the verb 'lay with' (a preposition, denoting consent) to 'lay her' (a direct object, denoting force) — that the text unambiguously depicts a rape rather than the 'mutual love' some scholars have proposed. Turning to Simeon and Levi's reprisal, she contends that their vengeance meets none of the criteria the Bible treats as legitimate and is therefore 'sinful,' yet remarkably draws no word of reproof from Jacob, the narrator, or God.

Against the critical consensus that Psalm 60 is a composite text stitched together from an eighth-century oracle and a sixth-century lament, Scolnic argues that the psalm reads as a unified composition set precisely within David's own reign — after his victories over northern Israel, the Arameans, the Philistines, and Moab, but before his difficult conquest of Edom. He reads the psalm's introduction against the account in II Samuel 8 and 1 Kings 11 of Joab 'returning' to bury the Israelite dead and killing every Edomite male, proposing that this unusual severity reflects an initial Israelite defeat that II Samuel's victory-focused narrative otherwise suppresses. The article closes with a broader defense of the psalm superscriptions that tie individual psalms to episodes in David's life, arguing they are original and theologically coherent rather than late scribal guesswork.

Against the popular image of Jacob and Rachel as young lovers of the same age, Wolff reconstructs a biblical chronology — using Jacob's stated age of 130 before Pharaoh and Joseph's age at his appointment as viceroy — showing that Jacob was 77 when he met Rachel at the well and 84 when he married her, while rabbinic sources suggest she may have been a child. Extending the argument through Abraham and Keturah, Isaac and the three-year-old Rebecca of rabbinic tradition, and Judah and Tamar, he argues that large spousal age gaps recur throughout Genesis and are neither incidental nor morally troubling to the text itself. He concludes that readers who imagine these couples as age-matched are projecting modern moral assumptions and modern lifespans onto a narrative whose own interest lies in character and consequence rather than chronology.

Psalms is one book divided into five collections, a shape the Midrash reads as deliberate: what Moses did, David also did, five books of Torah answered by five books of Psalms. Takes that parallel as more than structural — Moses the master of prophecy, God's word to people; David the master of prayer, people's word back — and follows the last three collections from harshness to hallelujah.

Menachem Fisch's philosophical commentary with Debra Band's illuminations. The reviewer frames the difficulty the book takes on: Qohelet is so full of one-line idioms and apparently unconnected musings that readers miss the forest for the trees, and finding a thread through it has occupied several books over the last two decades.