Latest Essays

The nature of prophecy is perhaps one of the most overlooked questions, but it was critically important to the medieval Jewish philosophers Sa’adia Gaon, Judah Halevi, Ibn Ezra, and Maimonides.

Channah and Elkanah’s yearly feast resembles a Mesopotamian fertility ritual; when year after year God doesn’t respond, Channah turns to God directly and enters the Tabernacle.

The inscrutable story of the Akedah, can be better understood in light of its subversive sequel, the equally morally complex book of Job.

Ben Sorer u-Moreh as a Test Case

When does God reward and when does God inflict punishment and why? A comparison of the books of Kings and Chronicles demonstrates that the Chronicler, troubled by the theology of Kings in which children can be punished for the sins of their parents, rewrote Israel’s history.