Vol. 53:3

Landau examines the biblical phrases qara' besheim X ("call [on] the name of the god X") and hizkir besheim X ("recall" or "make mention of the name of the god X"), arguing that in most of their occurrences — from the Elijah-versus-the-prophets-of-Baal contest on Mt. Carmel to Naaman's expectation that Elisha will cure his leprosy — these phrases denote a specific act: formally addressing a god by name to request that he manifest his powerful presence to help, witness an oath, or accept a sacrifice. Engaging closely with Willem Smelik's proposal that hizkir besheim X instead means "swear by the name of," the article defends "invoke" as the better reading across all four of that phrase's occurrences (Joshua 23:7, Isaiah 48:1, Amos 6:10, and Psalm 20:8), while distinguishing invocation from both simple utterance of a divine name and from worship proper.

Twersky argues that the red heifer ritual (Num. 19), long treated as the archetype of an inexplicable Torah statute, coheres around a single theme: the destruction of death and the triumph of life through resurrection. Tracing the heifer's affinities with the purification of the leper — itself read as a rite of symbolic death and rebirth — and with the rabbinic insistence on deliberately defiling the heifer's handler against Sadducean practice, the article proposes that the Parah Adumah's paradoxical power to render both pure and impure dramatizes the Torah's polemic against Egyptian cow- and bull-cults (Hathor and Apis) and stakes out resurrection as a claim exclusively about God's dominion over life and death.

Writing for an interfaith audience, Coxhead argues against the historic Christian view — traceable through Augustine, Aquinas, and especially Luther — that the Mosaic covenant demanded absolute moral perfection and therefore could not itself be a vehicle of grace. Marshaling the Tanakh's own descriptions of David, Hezekiah, and Josiah as Torah-keepers despite their acknowledged sins, together with the sacrificial system's built-in provision for atonement, he contends that Torah was always structured as a doable covenant of grace: obedience required was covenantal rather than absolute, and forgiveness was never external to the Law but integral to it from Sinai onward.

Bar surveys the Bible's two distinct uses of Rephaim — an ancient race of giants or heroes (Genesis, Deuteronomy, Chronicles) and the powerless "shades" of the dead in Sheol (Isaiah, Psalms, Proverbs, Job) — and argues, against readings that treat the Rephaim as minor deities or savior-healers, that the term originally designated a legendary line of heroic warriors and kings that biblical monotheism deliberately reduced to feeble, silent shades. Drawing on Ugaritic funerary texts, the Hadad and Eshmunazar inscriptions, and rabbinic and Talmudic sources, the article traces how figures like Og of Bashan and the giants defeated by David's men illustrate the transition from titanic hero to mocked corpse in Sheol.

Against scholars who read David's Philistine sojourn as straightforward treachery, Scolnic reframes it through the lens of Iron Age military technology: the Philistines held a near-monopoly on ironworking and iron weaponry, leaving Saul's Israel so under-armed that not a single soldier besides Saul and Jonathan carried sword or spear at Michmash. David's slaying of Goliath and appropriation of his sword, his later reliance on Philistine mercenaries (the Cherethites and Pelethites) even after becoming king, and Israel's eventual access to Edom's iron deposits are traced as the ironic mechanism by which time spent among the enemy equipped David — and the nation he built — to finally match Philistine arms.

Deuteronomy 21:18-21 is unusually specific: parents bring a wayward son before the elders, declare him disloyal, defiant, a glutton and a drunkard, and the men of the town stone him. Takes the law at its word and asks whether the sentence can be justified on the terms the text itself sets out.

Held in Jerusalem on Israel's Independence Day under the slogan OZ L'YISRAEL — oz meaning strength and carrying the numerical value 77, for Israel's 77th year. Sixteen contestants reached the final, after the preparatory camp that tours the country and puts them in front of former contestants.