Vol. 53:2
Hendel proposes a category of 'relational words' — connectives, syntactic markers, and pragmatic discourse markers — that neither refer to objects nor actions but instead connect and relate parts of a sentence or narrative. Working through examples ranging from the multiple senses of ki and the lamah/lammah distinction to the pairing of achar and acharay and the choice between a terminal heh and a prefixed lamed for 'to,' he argues that a single Hebrew relational word often corresponds to several distinct nuances rather than free variants. The article ranks its examples by the strength of textual support, from speculative Talmudic and Malbim readings to cases, such as Hirsch's account of lamah/lammah, that resolve genuine interpretive difficulties.
Hoham, one of five Amorite hill-country kings put to death by Joshua, is a biblical figure known only from a single chapter. Rosenberg proposes that his name derives not from an Anatolian root but from Ham, the Transjordanian capital of the giant Zuzim/Zamzumim destroyed by Chedorlaomer's coalition in Genesis 14, making Hoham the last scion of that people who fled west to giant-inhabited Hebron after the Ammonites overran his homeland. Marshaling evidence on the gigantic stature attributed to 'ethnic Amorites' in rabbinic and biblical sources, the article situates Hoham's alliance against the Gibeonites within a broader biblical narrative pattern of Israel overcoming Transjordanian and Cisjordanian giants.
Hollenback argues that Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13 were originally directed at the passive rather than the active party in male-on-male anal intercourse, and traces how English translations came to reverse that address. Following the chain from the Hebrew through the Latin Vulgate, several German translations of the Vulgate, Luther's German Pentateuch, and Tyndale's 1530 English Pentateuch, he shows that a German printer's substitution of 'boy' for 'male' in Leviticus 20:13, later adopted and extended by Luther, and Tyndale's own 'as with' phrasing borrowed from Luther, together produced the reading — still followed by modern English translations including the NJPS — that has held the field for five centuries.
The authors argue that the Akeda is not solely a test of Abraham's love and faith but also, and primarily, a measure-for-measure response to his earlier treatment of Hagar and Ishmael. Because 'fear of God' (yirat Elokim) in the Pentateuch always concerns interpersonal, not devotional, conduct, the angel's closing declaration that Abraham is now known to be 'God-fearing' points back to his conduct toward Hagar rather than to his willingness to sacrifice Isaac. A series of intertextual parallels between the expulsion of Hagar and Ishmael in Genesis 21 and the binding of Isaac in Genesis 22 is offered as evidence that the latter functions as atonement for the former.
Biblical and rabbinic sources repeatedly treat the kidneys, alongside the heart, as seats of moral understanding and conscience — a usage generally read today as metaphorical. Backon surveys recent medical research on personality changes reported after organ transplantation, on sensory neurites in the heart implicated in decision-making, and on cell memory recently demonstrated in kidney and nerve tissue, and argues that this literature lends the biblical language of the kidneys 'advising' or being 'searched' by God more than a purely figurative basis.
Reading the divine visitors' question 'Where is your wife Sarah?' alongside Abraham's earlier silence about God's promise that Sarah herself would bear his heir, the authors argue that Abraham repeatedly, if unintentionally, treated Sarah as subordinate rather than as an essential party to the covenant. The visitors' question, like God's questions to Adam and Cain, is less a request for information than a rebuke calculated to correct Abraham's relationship with his wife — and God's subsequent gentle handling of Sarah's doubt, and immediate resumption of confiding in Abraham, models how a covenantal relationship absorbs a rebuke without being broken by it.
The 120 satraps and three ministers described in Daniel 6 vastly exceed any attested count of Persian administrative divisions, which Ron argues marks the number as typological rather than historical — built, like the 127 provinces of Esther 1:1, on the sexagesimal round number 120 that elsewhere denotes a maximal human lifespan (Genesis 6:3, Deuteronomy 34:7). He further traces how this idealized figure likely became the basis for the traditionally cited membership of 120 in the rabbinic Men of the Great Assembly, and, through it, for the 120-seat Knesset.
Numbers 11, late in the second year of the wilderness: the people complain bitterly, fire ravages the camp's edge, and Moses has to intervene once again. Out of that comes the episode of the two men who prophesied in the camp rather than at the Tent — the ones who were not there.
Dalia Marx's month-by-month passage through the Jewish year, translated by Peretz Rodman, with art by Elad Lifshitz. Twelve months, twelve faces, twelve phases — the reviewer's point being that the year is only visible whole if each of its parts is taken in turn.