Justin Martyr, an early Church Father (c. 100–165 C.E.), interprets the strange appearance of the LORD to Abraham at Mamre as an early instantiation of God the Son, i.e., Jesus. While Rashbam obviously rejected this belief, he learned from this Christian interpretation and suggests that here, the name YHWH refers to an angel, which explains why YHWH speaks about YHWH in this story in the third person.
In Numbers 20, when the Israelites are without water, God tells Moses to get water from a stone, which he does by striking it, and is punished. Yet in Exodus 17, Moses does the same thing and the story ends positively. What is the relationship between these two accounts? Remarkably, R. Joseph Bekhor Shor says that they are two accounts of the same story.
“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.
Exodus 16 and Numbers 11 each describe God miraculously bringing quail to the hungry Israelites in the wilderness. What is the relationship between these two accounts?
According to Deuteronomy, a false prophet who has no message from God, and advocates worshiping other gods, can still successfully perform miracles and predict the future.
In a polemical response to Christian and Jewish allegorical interpretation of the Torah’s laws, Bekhor Shor writes that just as God speaks to Moses “clearly and without riddles” (Num 12:8), so too the Torah is clear and means what it says, and should not be interpreted allegorically.
Although incest taboos are found in the majority of cultures, medieval Jewish thinkers found this to be an insufficient explanation for the Torah’s prohibitions.
The law of the heifer whose neck is broken, eglah arufah, has puzzled both traditional and modern commentators. What is it meant to accomplish? How does it work?
Deuteronomy 20:19 forbids the chopping down of fruit trees during war-time, and offers the cryptic explanation כי האדם עץ השדה (ki ha-adam etz hasadeh), but what does this mean?
Thoughts on Torah Min HaShamayim
The Torah states “do not cook a kid in its mother's milk.” What does this phrase mean, and how did it develop into the prohibition of mixing meat and milk?