At creation, humans and animals were alike—plant-eating, unclothed, and speaking the same language; God even brings the beasts to Adam to find a fitting companion. Everything changes when Adam and Eve eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. What kind of story is this? Remarkable parallels with the Mesopotamian Gilgamesh epic show how the biblical author crafted an Israelite wisdom story about the end of humankind’s infancy.
Habakkuk 3 is framed as a lament, in which the psalmist asks God to save him and his people from danger. The core of the psalm is a divine theophany, in which YHWH is described as coming from afar to battle his enemies in classic ancient Near East mythological fashion.
“Great as the sea is your breaking,” Lamentations 2:13. Before we try to understand pain or tragedy, we must first perceive its magnitude.
Morally problematic halachot remain on the books despite rabbinic attempts to transform or reinterpret them. How do we relate to these texts as Torah from Sinai, coming from God?
Divine beings come to earth and have offspring with human women (Genesis 6). What is a story which sounds like a pagan myth doing in the Torah?
Literature and art are replete with images of angels descending to earth and joining humanity. One source for this image is a terse account in Genesis describing fallen angels, which is expanded upon in Second Temple literature. This interpretive tradition is suppressed in the classic rabbinic literature only to resurface again in the late narrative midrash, Pirqe de-Rabbi Eliezer.
Weighing the historicity of the exodus story entails more than addressing the lack of archaeological evidence.
