Latest Essays

Baruch Spinoza was excommunicated for his controversial beliefs about Judaism, including his rejection of the tenet of Mosaic authorship. However, Spinoza’s real originality is his radical and innovative claim that the origin of the biblical texts holds great significance for how they are to be read and interpreted.

Describing the Israelites crossing the Arnon Stream into Amorite territory, the Torah quotes the Book of YHWH’s Battles that speaks of “Waheb in Suphah,” a phrase that appears nowhere else in the Bible. Many creative explanations have been given, but based on a survey on the ground we can identify it as the “Town in the Stream,” an ancient biblical town whose name had long been forgotten.

Like many traditions with a long historical pedigree, Judaism has inherited its share of texts with racial bias. Failure to acknowledge this is one reason for prevalent conscious and subconscious racist views that can be found in the American Orthodox Jewish community—the community of which I am a part—which sometimes reveal themselves in overt statements and actions.

The Torah is clear that God refuses to allow the exodus generation to enter the land as a punishment for their sinful reaction to the spies’ report. Maimonides, however, argues that the punishment was a ruse; God never intended to allow that generation to enter the land.

Rabbi Dr. Louis Jacobs, voted “the greatest British Jew,” is best-known for his 1957 book that denied traditional notions of Torah min HaShamayim, the divine origin of the Torah. The resulting controversy still reverberates today.

Tradition and source criticism both see two ark traditions in the biblical text: The Ark of the Covenant and the Ark of the Testimony. The former accompanies Israelite troops into battle; it appears in Numbers 10 (וַיְהִי בִּנְסֹעַ הָאָרֹן) and in the stories of battles against the Philistines and Ammonites in Samuel. The latter remains in the Tabernacle, serving as a seat for YHWH’s glory and revelation.

As a historical commemoration, Passover is tied to a specific date. Nevertheless, the Torah gives a make-up date for bringing the offering a month later. Gerim, non-Israelites living among Israelites as equals, are also allowed to bring this offering, even though it wasn’t their ancestors who were freed. How do we make sense of these anomalies?  

The Israelite men are commanded to separate from their wives before the revelation at Sinai. The rabbis learn from this that Moses permanently separated from his wife (Num 12), to be available to speak with God at all times. Joseph ibn Kaspi (14th c.), however, claims that this distorts the plain meaning of the text and that celibacy is an affront to Jewish values.

The Mishnah adds further humiliation to the biblical sotah ritual for a suspected adulteress. Other rabbinic texts from the same period critique this expansion, as well as the gender inequality inherent in the ritual itself.

Short does not mean simple: Psalm 117 is one of the more difficult psalms. It is only two verses long and exhorts non-Israelites to praise YHWH. Why would such a psalm be written? A look at the worldview of the exilic prophet Deutero-Isaiah provides one answer, while reading this psalm together with the beginning of Psalm 118 provides another.

The Kedushah prayer is based on two quotes from angels: “Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord of Hosts...” (Isa 6:3) and “Blessed be the Glory of the Lord from its place” (Ezek 3:12). However, Shadal, the 19^th century polymath, explains that the second verse is not a quote by angels, but the result of a scribal error.

Boaz’s speech to the unnamed kinsman (Ruth 4:5) is difficult. By interpreting one element as an enclitic mem, as found in Eblaite, and by making use of the alternative textual option known as the ketiv, a new meaning for Boaz’s claim emerges.

This fundamental question lies at the heart of two stories: God suspending Mount Sinai over the Israelites to compel them to accept the Torah, and Joshua, with the Jordan River suspended over the Israelites, compelling them to accept mutual responsibility for each other's private sins.

Applying our critical faculties to study the Bible, asking questions about its origin, context, and genre.

Ruth’s consumption of barley and wheat gleaned from the field of Boaz was an integral step in her transformation from a “foreigner” who arrived from the fields of Moab to a “daughter” in Judah.

Job's friends piously justify God's actions and challenge Job to accept that he has done wrong. Yet God sides with Job and rebukes the friends for not “speaking about me in honesty as did my servant Job”.

The biblical priestly text is unique in the ancient Near East, in that it utilizes scribal features such as colophons, cross references, and casuistic laws (when... then...), aimed at making the text accessible to the public. This preserved Israelite priestly writing past the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple.

Psalm 91 expresses confidence that God will protect the righteous from plagues, demons, and wild animals, while allowing the wicked to perish. How are we to understand such language, especially in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic?

During the Babylonian siege, while Jeremiah was in King Zedekiah’s prison, he redeems his cousin'’s land, upon YHWH’s instruction. The incarcerated prophet thus symbolically enacts the future restoration for the people who will soon be exiled from their land.

Leviticus 18 and 20 condemn sexual sins using several harsh terms; toevah, zimmah, chesed, tevel. Do these terms have specific meanings and what do they tell us about the Torah’s reason for forbidding incest?

In the scapegoat ritual of Yom Kippur and the bird ritual of the metzora, sin/impurity is transferred onto an animal and it is sent away. These biblical examples have parallels in Eblaite, Hittite, Ugaritic, and Neo-Assyrian apotropaic rituals.

The precept וְאָהַבְתָּ לְרֵעֲךָ כָּמוֹךָ “you shall love your neighbor as yourself” in Leviticus, is one of many action-oriented commandments focused on Israelite social cohesion. Only in Late Antique Jewish and early Christian sources, did the rule take on a transcendent role as the principle in which all of the Torah is encompassed.

Compared to the birth of a son, Leviticus 12 requires a double-period of purification upon the birth of a daughter. Interpreters in antiquity offered two basic models to explain this. The first approach was to utilize biological “knowledge,” the second was to ground the law in the biblical story of Adam and Eve.

Mesopotamian gynecological texts and what we know about women’s post-partum flow are helpful in parsing the unusual Hebrew idiom demei tohorah, literally, “bloods of purity,” used in Leviticus 12 to describe the second stage of postpartum bleeding.

Three traditions of pronouncing the Hebrew Bible existed in the first millennium C.E.: Babylonian, Palestinian, and Tiberian, each with its own written vocalization system. From the later Middle Ages on, however, biblical manuscripts have been written almost exclusively with the vowels and cantillation marks of the Tiberian system while paradoxically, the Tiberian pronunciation itself fell into oblivion.