Vol. 53:4
A close reading of every reference to music in the Saul narrative of I Samuel, tracing how music functions as a sign of Saul's election as king (I Sam. 10:5-8), a therapeutic response to his affliction by an evil spirit (16:14-23), a trigger for his violent jealousy of David (18:6-11), and — through its conspicuous absence — a marker of his final rejection (19:9-24). The article argues that as Saul's kingship unravels, music's power to help him steadily diminishes, culminating in the silence that accompanies his last, humiliating breakdown.
The genealogies of Genesis 5 and 11 appear to date the emergence of Adam to roughly six millennia ago, in apparent tension with the archaeological record of far older civilizations such as Jericho. Rather than reading these tables as continuous father-son chronology, this article argues — drawing on the term holid ('begat') as marking official lines of succession, on parallel ten-generation king lists from the Ancient Near East, and on the ten eleh/zeh toledot divisions that structure the whole book of Genesis — that the genealogies are a schematic, dynastic charting of the line leading from Adam to the future Israelite monarchy, not a literal count of years.
The chalil, a reed pipe appearing just six times in the Tanakh, is unusual among biblical instruments for its presence at both joyous occasions — prophetic processions, coronations, revelries, victory celebrations — and at funerary laments. Drawing on Ancient Near Eastern parallels, Mishnaic sources, and the mourning ritual for the god Tammuz, this article argues that the chalil's dual role is not a contradiction but reflects a deeper, de-mythologized connection to fertility, birth, and rebirth that outlasted the ancient cultic associations the Bible otherwise suppresses.
Psalm 132:6 — 'We heard it was in Ephrath; we came upon it in the region of Jaar' — has resisted satisfactory explanation, with some scholars even excising the verse from the psalm. Reviewing traditional Jewish commentary and modern scholarship on what 'it' refers to, where Ephrathah and the 'forested field' are located, and who 'we' are, this article argues that the verse is best read against I Samuel 6, where the Ark was found in a field near Beth-Shemesh — and proposes that the verse may preserve David's own boyhood memory, from Bethlehem/Ephrathah, of hearing that the Ark had miraculously been recovered.
Exodus juxtaposes the Israelites' armed departure from Egypt with Moses carrying Joseph's bones, a pairing largely passed over by classical commentators except for the Mekhilta and R. S.R. Hirsch. Building on traditional readings of Joseph's oath to his brothers, this article argues that Joseph's remains functioned as a deliberate, multi-generational mechanism of religious memory transmission — 'spiritual ammunition' of gratitude, faith, and identity that complemented, and perhaps outweighed, the nation's literal weapons, and that this Jewish approach to sacred objects as connective tools rather than venerated relics has remained central to Jewish practice ever since.
Barbara AB Symons's collection on the haftarah. The reviewer starts from how long the practice has stood — public Torah reading on Shabbat for two thousand years, with a reading from the Prophets as its counterpoint and conclusion attested from early on — and what renewing it might now mean.
Three separate thresholds in the Bible fall at the same age. Proposes one explanation for all of them from neurodevelopment: synaptic pruning, the elimination of weak connections, begins around nine and is largely complete at twenty — before which, on this reading, the brain is still a child's.