The Amarna letters are presented in the voice of various kings, but they are actually literary creations crafted by professional scribes who employ wordplay, parallelism, and other rhetorical techniques to make their patrons' messages as persuasive as possible.
Dr.
Alice Mandell
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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.
Prof.
René Bloch
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The Tower of Babel story (Genesis 11:1-9) is not only about the downfall of Babylon or the origin of languages. It is a reflection on how languages work differently, on the limitations of one language to convey the sense of another, and the insufficiency inherent in translation.
Prof.
Edward L. Greenstein
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