Vol. 54:2

A sequel to the author’s study of qara’ besheim X and hizkir besheim X. Examining the remaining biblical verses that use these phrases — together with qara’ sheim X and hizkir (’et) sheim X — this article argues that their meaning depends neither on the verb chosen nor on how the divine name is introduced, and that across the corpus they carry four distinct senses: to invoke, to worship, to relate someone’s great characteristics and acts, or to designate and appoint.

Seven-day units pervade biblical law and ritual. Drawing on the linguistic link between sheva (seven) and sova (fullness), and on the circaseptan (roughly seven-day) rhythms documented in the medical literature — nested within shorter ultradian and biochemical cycles — this note argues that the seven-day week expresses a natural sense of wholeness, unity, and completeness.

Why does Noah, the righteous survivor of the Flood, end up drunk and shamed in his tent — and why is Canaan, not Ham, cursed? Reading the episode as the coda to the Flood narrative and as an anti-pagan polemic, this study sets Noah’s Vintner Tale against the Ugaritic “Drunkenness of El,” arguing that the Torah adopts a familiar pagan motif in “human language” precisely to overturn it with a demand for moral responsibility.

The scapegoat cast to Azazel on Yom Kippur is among the Torah’s most enigmatic rites. Following Ramban’s identification of Azazel with Samael and his pairing of the two goats with Jacob and Esau, this study reads the Sair L’Azazel and the Sair L’Hashem as entangled opposites on a single continuum of human desire — a ritual dramatization of sexuality, sin, and the enduring possibility of repentance.

The discovery of ancient Near Eastern texts that parallel the Torah has long unsettled traditional readers. This study examines how R. Abraham Isaac Hacohen Kook, in Eder HaYakar and the posthumously published Lenvuchei HaDor, reframed these parallels — not as evidence that the Torah merely reflects its environment, but as traces of an earlier human encounter with the divine will, later refined and preserved in the Torah. A case study of the laws of kidnapping shows how the approach works in practice.

Why is Psalm 94 the song of the day for Wednesday? Examining the psalm’s form, diction, placement, and content, this study argues that Psalm 94 is properly the second half of Psalm 93 and, like it, commemorates the splitting of the sea — an event traditionally dated to a Wednesday — offering a fuller answer than earlier explanations for its assignment to the fourth day of the week.

A review of The JPS Bible Commentary: Psalms 120–150 (commentary by Adele Berlin, with sidebars by Avigdor Shinan and Benjamin D. Sommer; JPS, 2023) — the first installment of a multi-volume JPS Psalms set — noting its focus on the ancient meaning of the text and its use of the 1985/1999 JPS translation rather than the newer gender-sensitive edition.