Latest Essays

The only named character in the story of the spies whom Joshua sends to Jericho holds the key to the story’s message.

Are the scouts punished for speaking badly about the land or for causing the Israelites to rebel?

In the final blood ceremony formalizing the covenant at Sinai, how informed is Israel about the covenant’s details when they declare, na’aseh v’nishma, “let us do and [then] let us hear”?

In a 1927 speech at the inauguration of the Hebrew University’s Institute for Jewish Studies, Dr. Rabbi Felix Perles called on Jewish scholars to be on the forefront of critical Bible study. He compares this effort to how Maimonides, even though he was accused of abrogating the Torah, incorporated philosophical study into Judaism.

Israelite religion developed from a revolutionary idea: monotheism. And religion alone, not external factors, accounted for the remarkable preservation of Jewish national identity and consciousness in exile.

The land of milk and honey, the ladder to heaven, Mount Sinai, the seven heavens—these are some of the themes explored in Shavuot’s food history.

Lot’s older daughter gets him drunk and conceives the forefather of the Moabites. Tamar, Boaz’s foremother, conceals her identity from her father-in-law, Judah, to bear his child. Although Naomi encourages Ruth to seduce Boaz, Ruth reveals her identity to him, thereby correcting the legacy of her foremothers, including that of the daughters of the Moabites, who seduced the Israelites into apostasy.

“When the ram’s horn sounds a long blast, they shall go up on the mountain” (Exodus 19:13). The original intention was for all Israelites to be like priests, and experience YHWH’s revelation on the mountain. But when YHWH descends and the horn sounds, the people recoil and remain below.

In 1096, the Crusaders captured the Holy Land from the Seljuk Turks. On the way, they stopped in Jewish communities throughout the Rhineland and massacred them in the name of Christ. Robert the Monk drew on the biblical song of the sea to highlight God’s support for the crusade, while the Chronicle of Solomon bar Simson used Psalms and Lamentations to articulate Jewish suffering and martyrdom.

The creative exegetical methods of reading texts both literally and non-literally are not limited to the interpretation of the Bible. Commentaries on ancient cuneiform literature from Mesopotamia have been found dating all the way back to the end of the 8th century B.C.E.

Cursing YHWH is more than simply expressing contempt and irreverence. In the biblical world view, it is attempted deicide, and thus is punishable by death.

The story of Michal, King Saul’s daughter and David’s first wife—the only woman in the Bible described as being in love with a man—is framed by two window scenes. In the first, she is the spunky, loving bride who helps David escape his pursuers through her back window. In the second, embittered and depleted in spirit, she watches the triumphant David through the window with contempt. What happened in between?

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?