Latest Essays

Jeremiah excoriates the Judahites for sacrificing babies to Baʿal at the Tophet, in a valley near Jerusalem. Archaeological excavations throughout Carthage uncovered the remains of thousands of babies offered to Baʿal and his consort Tanit, together with dedicatory inscriptions, referring to the offering as a molekh, the very term the Bible uses to prohibit child sacrifice.

Homosexuality is a modern construct, and using it to interpret the very few biblical and ancient Near Eastern texts that speak of male-to-male sexual interaction would be anachronistic. Masculinity and the male role in society provide a better lens to examine male relationships.

The sanctification of all Israel in Leviticus 17–26—expanding the obligation to be holy from the priests to a collective requirement for all Israelites—further elevates the priesthood to a hegemonic social position.

In his famous essay on Moses, Asher Ginsberg (Ahad Ha’am 1856–1927), an influential Zionist thinker, recasts the revelation at the burning bush as Moses encountering his internal voice. His heroic Moses is shadowed by other, more melancholic figures, such as Jeremiah, and even Muhammad, as imagined by Thomas Carlyle. Rather than a figure of strength and power, Ahad Ha’am’s Moses comes to express the anxieties and ambivalences of early Zionism.

The gospels present Pontius Pilate, the Roman procurator, condemning Jesus to death, and his soldiers crucifying Jesus at the behest of the priests and the Jewish crowd. How, then, did the claim—found even in the Talmud—that the Jews physically crucified Jesus develop?

The Haggadah’s insistence that God, without an intermediary, saved the Israelites from Egypt is a veiled retort to the Christian belief that God relied on Jesus as an agent of redemption. Moreover, the midrash replaces the Arma Christi tradition of recounting the weapons Jesus used to save humanity during the Crucifixion with its own distinctively Jewish arsenal of redemption: pestilence, a sword, the Shechinah, the staff, and blood.

Around the Seder table with scholars.

The young women in the Song of Songs (2:15) repurpose a bucolic ditty to suggestively beckon young men. The key to their entendre is in the Arabic cognate for the verb לְחַבֵּל.

The night before Passover, chametz “leaven” is searched for and then burned the next morning—ביעור חמץ biʿur chametz. Afterwards, any remaining unfound chametz is nullified and declared to be “like the dust of the earth,”— ביטול חמץ bittul chametz. Which of these acts fulfills the biblical requirement?

Cats were known and domesticated in ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome, but are absent from the Bible and Second Temple literature. The Persians despised cats, but the Talmud tolerates them.

If a man or woman suffering from tzaraʿat, a skin disease, has hair that turns tzahov, they are impure. In modern Hebrew, tzahov means yellow, but what does it mean in the Bible?

Does a woman simply receive and nourish a man’s seed? Or does she also produce her own seed to conceive a child?

To highlight how Israelite ritual is not meant to be a secret known only to the priests, the Tabernacle’s inauguration is conducted publicly, before all the people, including rituals usually carried out in the sanctum. Herein lies the sin of Nadav and Avihu: offering incense before YHWH in the privacy of the sanctum.

The post-exilic book of Jonah opposes the chest-thumping that was prevalent during the northern kingdom’s resurgence under Jeroboam II, as displayed by the historical Jonah of Gath-hepher (2 Kings 14:25). It insists that YHWH is a universal god and that Israel must reconcile itself to living in a world where all penitents, regardless of nationality, are pardoned.

Immediately after the death of two of Aaron’s sons, Nadav and Avihu, YHWH warns Moses that priests are prohibited from consuming wine before serving in the Tabernacle. Is their mysterious death the result of some form of intoxication?

Ezra-Nehemiah mentions only four of the twelve kings who ruled the Persian empire: Cyrus, Darius, Xerxes, and Artaxerxes. The book of Daniel also speaks of four Persian kings, and adds a fictional Darius the Mede as their precursor. Historically, the Achaemenid period lasted 220 years, but using only the kings mentioned in the Bible, rabbinic texts reconstruct a 52-year Persian period.

Ahasuerus grants Haman permission to kill the Jews. Why, then, does Haman delay the attack for almost a year based on a lottery, and why, if the attack was to cover all 127 provinces, does he limit its scope to only one day?

The creation accounts, the Garden of Eden, the innovations and life spans of early humans, and the flood story are best understood as an Axial Age critique of polytheistic, mythical cosmology.

Partzufim, “faces,” is the original term for Purim masks. Modern Hebrew uses the biblical term masekhah instead, which sounds suspiciously like the English term “mask,” whose etymology is itself a riddle. Thus the mask succeeds in staying anonymous.

TheTorah.com engages the Documentary and Supplementary Hypotheses, source, redaction, and textual criticism, and even offers moral critiques of Torah laws and narratives, but what is Steinberg really trying to accomplish?

Falling face-down on the ground, with hands and feet outstretched, was a common gesture of honor and respect in the Bible. Why is prostration only performed today on the High Holidays?

What is the actual size of the Tabernacle? How thick are the planks? How do the covers drape over the structure? These questions suggest that the biblical text was composed not to facilitate the physical construction of a three-dimensional structure but to engender visualization, much like the texts accompanying the construction of mandalas.

YHWH instructs Moses to carve a second set of tablets and come up the mountain (Exodus 34). YHWH then presents a set of laws, including: Don’t intermarry with the Canaanites; don’t make idols; and do observe Matzot, Shabbat, Shavuot, Ingathering, and Passover. What is the nature of this collection of laws?

Moses issues an ultimatum to God: “If you don’t forgive Israel, erase me from Your book” (Exodus 32:32). God forgives Israel but erases Moses from the Torah portion of Tetzaveh anyway because the curse of a Torah scholar always comes true. Here is the story of how this medieval midrash came about, and how it developed into the modern myth that Tetzaveh is the only portion after Moses’ birth that is missing his name.