Vol. 54:1
Esther is among the strangest books in the Hebrew Bible, and its place in the canon was not always secure. Setting it beside the books that were debated and admitted — Kohelet, Song of Songs — and those excluded but kept by Christians, this essay asks what kind of book Esther is and where it came from.
Opening on Gibran's parable of the eye that sees a mountain the other senses deny, this reading takes sight in the Samson cycle as a plot device rather than a motif: what Samson sees drives what he does, and the eye offers an observation the other faculties cannot replicate.
Sarah dies suddenly, just after the binding of Isaac. Midrash Tanchuma Vayera 23:5 and Pirkei d'Rabbi Eliezer 32 both have Satan bring her news of Isaac's death, and she faints and dies on hearing it — a sequence with a modern cardiac diagnosis behind it.
The Narration of Joseph is a short fragmentary Coptic text of the fourth or fifth century that retells the selling of Joseph in Genesis 37:15-35. It belongs to the genre of rewritten Scripture, which builds on the biblical text with additions and even changes — and those embellishments are set here beside the rabbinic readings of the same verses.
Genesis 22 read not as a tale of submission to divine cruelty but as a staged drama of faith redefined, sanctifying restraint over zeal and conscience over conformity. Why test Abraham at all, why so horrifying a test, why his silence after he had argued for Sodom, why Isaac's compliance, and why blessings he had already been given.
Balaam's third blessing, to Balak's chagrin and vexation, promises a ruler risen above Agag. Read in the context of Numbers 24:1-11 rather than as an isolated line, the verse is asked whether it looks forward to the king who would one day spare an Agag of his own.
The long-awaited second volume of the Eerdmans collection edited by Bauckham, Davila and Panayotov, following its 2013 predecessor and now matching Charlesworth's classic Old Testament Pseudepigrapha in bulk. Works falsely titled to a biblical hand, held significant and perhaps sacred in their day, preserving views other than those that became the canon.
Moshe Sokolow's book takes history, methodology and pedagogy together across three sections, the first of them 'The Theoretical Realm' — forms of biblical interpretation and how to tell a valid reading from an invalid one. A reviewer who teaches Tanakh for a living finds an author at home both in academic Bible study and on the yeshivah benches.