Latest Essays

Statements that express our feelings are often confused with factual assertions.

The Bible knows about many priestly families, including the Levites, the Mushites (descendants of Moses), and the Zadokites. By the time of Ezra and Chronicles, however, only Aaronide priests were legitimate, and other families either merged with them or were demoted.

Leviticus allows priests and their families to enjoy the donations and sacrifices to YHWH. This differs from Hittite practice of forbidding priests access to holy objects outside of limited ritual contexts. What is the reason for the difference between these two priestly systems?

Leviticus 25 legislates a multi-tiered system of rights and requirements that act as a corrective to a market in which even human beings can be sold. This system preserves the dignified status of Israelite brothers as free persons with their own ancestral agricultural land, ensuring that no Israelites become a permanent lower class.

Upon purifying the Temple in his first year as king, Hezekiah delays the celebration of Passover until the 14^th of Iyar, the date of the Torah’s Pesach Sheni, “Second Passover.” A close examination of the story (2 Chr 29–30) demonstrates that this wasn’t a simple application of the Pesach Sheni law, but that Hezekiah was innovating in order to create unity between the northern Israelites and southern Judahites.

Only two law collections in the ancient Near East discuss bestiality: the Torah and the Hittite laws. How do these laws differ, and what motivated them?

Leviticus 18 includes an extensive list of prohibited sexual relations, including incest, but it does not mention relations between a father and daughter. How can this glaring omission be explained?

Leviticus’ list of conjugally-forbidden relations was extensive for its time. While the Karaites expanded the list greatly, the rabbis did so only slightly, leaving modern-day rabbinic Judaism with more relatives permitted for marriage than most western societies.

The western wall of the ancient synagogue in Dura Europos (245 C.E.) is covered with a series of wall paintings depicting the story of Moses. What can we learn by a close reading of these panels?

Egyptian artists depicted their northern Levantine neighbors as prisoners or warriors being smitten, as dignitaries presenting tribute, and even as slaves working on royal building projects. This gives us a glimpse of what Levantines looked like in this period from an Egyptian perspective, including, perhaps, those who later identified as Israelites.

In four passages, the Torah has a father explaining different commandments to a son by referencing the exodus from Egypt. Comparing the wording in these biblical passages, the rabbis reinterpreted—and even revised—them to reflect a father explaining Pesach to four different sons: wise, stupid, wicked, and one who doesn’t ask.

Conversion to Judaism as we know it is a rabbinic development, but what, then is the biblical ger, and why does he need to be circumcised in order to eat from the paschal offering?

In the Torah’s description of the paschal sacrifice, God pasachs the Israelites. Though the simple meaning of this verb is “to spare or protect,” the standard translation of the verb here is “pass over.” A look at the Greek-Jewish translations of the verb pasach and the festival name, Pesach, and a consideration of the theological problems with Exodus 12:23, sheds light on how this translation came about. 

The Elephantine Stele and the Great Harris Papyrus both describe Pharaoh Setnakhte’s war against the Levantine usurper Irsu in 1186 B.C.E. Reading these accounts together with Manetho’s story of the war against Osarseph offers us a possible historical context for what eventually became the Bible’s story of the exodus of Israel from Egypt.

Already in the early 2nd millennium B.C.E., people knew that diseases were contagious, and fear of contagion plays a key role in the Torah’s laws regarding the skin ailment, tzaraʿat. What does this mean for understanding other kinds of tum’ah?

The Torah prescribes the observance of festivals on very specific dates, but does not explain how the calendar must be reckoned: Is it lunar? Is it solar? Does it follow some other scheme? And why is the Torah silent on this?

A child’s mother remains impure for forty days after the birth of a boy and eighty days after a girl. A comparison of this procedure with similar ones in Hittite birth rituals suggests that this gender-based differentiation serves as a kind of ritual announcement of the child’s gender.

The Romans were baffled as to why Jews would not eat pork, an idiosyncrasy that became the subject of speculation as well as ethnic humor. In response, Jewish texts highlight the way the hated Romans remind the rabbis of pigs and wild boars.

Although the book of Esther seems to have “forgotten” important Jewish themes like God, a closer look reveals that memory and biblical allusions play an important role in how the book tells its story.

Personal agency and consent—granted or withheld—pervade the book of Esther, and are inextricably related to pre-existing power structures such as gender and social status.

The transition from the chatat (חטאת) sin offering in Leviticus 4 to the asham (אשׁם) guilt offering in Leviticus 5 is sudden, even seeming to collapse them into one offering. The history of these offerings, when and why they were introduced into the Temple service, sheds light on the interpretation and structure of these chapters.

“And He called to Moses and YHWH spoke to him” וַיִּקְרָא אֶל מֹשֶׁה וַיְדַבֵּר יְ־הוָה אֵלָיו —Leviticus 1:1. Why is YHWH, the subject of this verse, missing from the opening phrase, and appearing only after the second verb? Traditional and critical scholars struggle to explain this syntactic problem.

Biblical prohibitions against preparing food on Shabbat are further developed in the Second Temple and rabbinic periods. At the same time, a new emphasis emerges: celebrating Shabbat with festive meals.

The author of the Covenant Collection in Exodus knew the Laws of Hammurabi and revised them to fit with Israelite legal and ethical conceptions. This is clear when we compare their laws of assault in each.