After Miriam is stricken with a skin affliction for speaking badly of Moses, Aaron begs Moses to forgive her, and Moses prays to God for her healing with five words: אֵל נָא רְפָא נָא לָהּ “O God, pray, heal her.” But the original prayer was likely different.
When Amnon presses his sister Tamar to sleep with him, she begs him to ask the king for her hand in marriage. Was such a marriage really an option in ancient Israel? After Amnon rapes Tamar, King David is angry, but silent. Why is it Absalom who feels compelled to avenge her?
God commands Abraham to sacrifice his son, Isaac, and Abraham comes within moments of slaughtering him before being stopped by an angel. Behind the drama lies a carefully crafted, layered composition shaped by revisions, allusions, and cross-references that show how the Akedah, the binding of Isaac, took shape and grew over time.
The command to go to war against Sihon, even though his territory lies east of the Jordan River (Deuteronomy 2:24–25), seemingly marks the beginning of the conquest of the promised land and reflects a tradition in which Moses, not Joshua, leads it. But instead, Moses asks to cross the land peacefully (vv. 26–29). The Midrash portrays this choice as disobedience that God ultimately validates. A literary critical approach highlights how Moses’s response is a redaction, an inner-biblical midrash, that reconciles different layers of the text.
“The hidden matters belong to YHWH our God,” declares Deuteronomy 29:28, “but with overt matters, it is for us and our children ever to apply all the provisions of this Torah.” This verse stands in isolation, prompting mystical speculation about the nature of the “hidden” and “overt” matters… until we realize that the passage has been redacted, and that the verse has been detached from its original context, which explained its meaning clearly.
In the original Priestly account of the sotah ritual, an adulterous woman herself brings a grain offering, and the priest publicly humiliates and curses her as part of a purification process for her sin. Later, the Holiness School editors reworked the narrative: the focus shifts to a jealous husband who suspects his wife of infidelity and brings her before the priests to undergo the ordeal of bitter waters—a divine test that determines her guilt or innocence.
Are the scouts punished for speaking badly about the land or for causing the Israelites to rebel?
Ahasuerus grants Haman permission to kill the Jews. Why, then, does Haman delay the attack for almost a year based on a lottery, and why, if the attack was to cover all 127 provinces, does he limit its scope to only one day?
Already the editors of the Torah recognized the discrepancies between the two creation stories in Genesis 1 and 2–3 and made redactional alignments so the two stories would read better next to each other. Such awareness is also evident among the earliest interpreters of the Bible, including the book of Jubilees and the Septuagint.
The creation account was divided in the post-exilic period into six days to provide an etiology for Shabbat. This necessitated creating light on day one to distinguish between day and night. In turn, it required assigning significance to the sun and moon on day four beyond their role as sources of light.
Was the 13th of Adar a day when the Jews successfully defended themselves against their enemies, or was it a day when they could take vengeance against their enemies? Does Mordechai’s edict offset Haman’s edict or replace it?
The Hebrew book of Esther was translated into Greek and expanded in the 1st century B.C.E. It was then revised and contracted in two further textual forms. A fourth version preserved only in a late first-millennium Old Georgian translation combines all three Greek texts, using a conservative redaction approach, similar to what scholars posit happened with the Pentateuch.
Shechem, a local prince, falls in love with Jacob’s daughter Dinah, and her brothers approve of the marriage as long as he is willing to be circumcised. Given Deuteronomy’s prohibition against intermarriage, later scribes revised the story into a slaughter of the natives. This was too harsh for later scribes, who recast the story as brothers avenging their sister’s rape.
The author of Numbers 35 uses an existing set of laws that distinguish between murder and manslaughter to determine what kind of killer may escape to a city of refuge. This creates confusion about what it means to be a rotzeach (“murderer” or “killer”) and who executes the murderer: the assembly or the blood avenger?
The festival calendar in Deuteronomy 16 began as a short revision of the calendar in Exodus 23. As it was expanded to clarify and adjust its details, it merged its springtime Matzot festival with the Pesach offering, which was originally connected to the consecration of firstborn animals.
Deuteronomy does not have the festival of Shemini Atzeret (“the eighth day of assembly”), while Leviticus and Numbers do. This difference helps explain why the festival is absent in the story of Solomon’s dedication of the Temple in Kings but appears in the version of this same story in Chronicles.
Already in 1877, Marcus Kalisch, one of the first Jewish scholars to engage in the critical study of the Bible, noted that the story of Balaam’s donkey is a late insertion which contradicts the rest of the story, both narratively and ideologically. Indeed, in the main story, Balaam is a prophetic character to be respected, while the supplement lampoons him.
The story of the flowering staff in its current form and context, confirms YHWH’s previous designation of the Aaronides as priests. Originally, however, the story presented YHWH’s selection of the tribe of Levi as his priestly caste.
The story of Moses follows a pattern that is typical of ancient Near Eastern fugitive hero narratives. However, when Moses goes to Mount Horeb, the plot deviates from the usual “divine encounter” feature. What does this tell us about the composition of the story of Moses and the Burning Bush?
After the two hundred and fifty tribal leaders, led by Korah, were burnt, God tells Elazar to use the fire-pans to plate the altar to remind Israel that only priests may offer incense (Num 17:5). But is this the original reason for the plating? A redaction-critical analysis shows that the story once had a different purpose in mind.
Originally Leviticus 18 prohibited homosexual incest with a man’s father (v. 7) and his uncle (v. 14). When the prohibition of male homosexual intercourse was added, the Torah modified the aforementioned laws and consequently changed the meaning of לגלות ערוה “to uncover nakedness.”
Before circumcision was a mitzvah, it was a cultural marker: Thus Joshua introduces circumcision to Israel at Gilgal (Joshua 5:2-9), Jacob’s sons insist that the Shechemites circumcise before Shechem marries their sister (Genesis 34), and the Israelites scorn the Philistines for being uncircumcised (Judges 14:3).
“YHWH said to Moses: ‘Come up to me on the mountain and stay there so that I might give you the tablets of stone and the teaching and the commandment that I have written to teach them.’”—Exodus 24:12
Betuel, Rebecca’s father, mysteriously appears and disappears in the negotiations over Rebecca’s marriage.
At the well, the servant asks Rebecca who her father is, and she answers, “I am the daughter of Betuel the son of Milkah, whom she bore to Nahor” (Genesis 24:24). Why the unusual genealogical description?
The anomalous and paradoxical nature of the twelfth curse – Deuteronomy 27:26.
Moses tells the soldiers returning from the Midianite war that they must purify themselves from corpse impurity. Elazar then jumps in with a unique law in Moses’ name about the need to purify metal in fire. Critical and traditional scholars alike—including the scribes of the Samaritan Pentateuch—were troubled by why Elazar and not Moses teaches this law.
An ancient quote, preserved in Jephthah’s speech to the King of Ammon, gives us a clue into the methods of the Torah’s redaction and the status of pre-pentateuchal sources.
A new analysis of compositional layers suggests that God responds to Korah’s rebellion with patience and beauty—until someone changed the ending.
“There is nothing at all, nothing but this manna” (Num 11:6): How the manna tradition overtook the suffering in the wilderness tradition.
How subversive literature becomes normalized.
Deuteronomy 28 imagines the possibility of Israel disappearing, and eventually assimilating into the nations where it is exiled. Deuteronomy 30:1-10, however, predicts Israel’s future repentance and consequent restoration.
Throughout the Torah, Israel is warned not to imitate the surrounding nations. Yet Deuteronomy speaks of the people appointing a king if they want to be “like all the nations” around them. Is YHWH commanding Israel to appoint a king or just reluctantly permitting it?
Did Caleb receive the Negev or Hebron? Is he a Judahite, a Calebite or a Kenizzite? The redacted account of Caleb in the Bible reflects the developing realities of southern Judah in the First and Second Temple periods.
Joseph, sold by two different groups (Midianites and Ishmaelites), seems to have been bought by two different men (Potiphar, captain of the guard, and an unnamed Egyptian man), leading to two discrete storylines, each of which place Joseph in a different position when he meets the cupbearer and the baker.
Before Moses dies, he asks God for a leader who will “come and go” before the people. God’s response is unequivocal: appoint Joshua. Nevertheless, as the narrative continues, God places Joshua under Elazar the priest, a clear sign of later redaction. When was this change made and why?
When Balaam and Balak were Independent Characters
If the people are thirsty for lack of water, why complain to Moses that they “have no grain or pomegranates”? Together with other textual anomalies, this narrative discontinuity suggests that interwoven into the water-at-Merivah story is a fragment from a different story: the missing opening verses of the non-Priestly account of the spies.
Kadesh-barnea is in the Wilderness of Paran, and Kadesh is in the Wilderness of Zin; how are we to explain the Scouts’ return to “Kadesh in the Wilderness of Paran?”
According to Ezra (3:4) and Nehemiah (8:14-15) the returnees celebrated the holiday of Sukkot according to the law as it “was written,” but differences between their celebrations and the prescriptions in the Torah suggest that the laws they had written were slightly different than ours. Was the Torah finalized by the time Ezra-Nehemiah was written?
Kohelet begins and ends with the phrase הֲבֵל הֲבָלִים “all is futile” (1:2, 12:8). Rashbam argues that these aren’t the author’s words but an editorial framing, which includes the famous ending that the sum of the matter is to fear God and keep His commandments (12:13). If we remove this framing, the book ends on a very different note.
Why God repeats his command to Jonah a second time
Numbers 32 combines two versions of how Gad and Reuven receive Moses’ permission to settle the Transjordan. The non-Priestly story emphasizes fraternity and kinship, while the Priestly version emphasizes law and obedience to YHWH. By synthesizing them, the redactor suggests that law can serve as a pillar around which the Israelite community can coalesce.
A cornerstone of the Jewish luni-solar calendar or a commandment about the order of months?
A literary strategy used by pre-modern editors and authors that works in a similar way to the classic cinematographic catch-phrase, “Meanwhile, Back at the Ranch.” (With an addendum by Prof. Marc Brettler)
