Latest Essays

Jacob is renamed Israel after being wounded in his struggle with a divine being. The Torah then introduces the prohibition against eating the sciatic nerve, a commandment that has played little role in shaping Jewish identity. Remarkably, in medieval China, the Kaifeng Jews elevated this otherwise marginal rule into their defining communal name.

In the biblical narrative (Genesis 26, 28), Esau marries Judith, Basemath, and Mahalath. A later genealogical list of Edomite clans (Genesis 36) says that he married Adah, Aholibamah, and Basemath. To make sense of this contradiction, medieval commentaries offer creative backstories, yielding different tallies for the total number of Esau’s wives.

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.

Why would God make righteous people suffer just to test their faithfulness? With Job, the Bible is explicit that it was in response to Satan’s challenge, but what about Abraham? Jubilees (2^nd cent. C.E.), and later the Talmud and midrash, reimagine the Akedah to have been instigated by Mastema, the Satan, or jealous angels. The midrash goes further and envisions the demon Samael tempting Abraham to make him fail.

Sarah is absent from the biblical account of Isaac’s binding, and there’s no indication that Abraham even discussed God’s command with her. Would she have been an active participant, a faithful supporter, or a grief-stricken mother? Later interpreters filled in her role according to their religious and cultural contexts.

Rebecca endures a difficult pregnancy and inquires of YHWH, who reveals that the younger will surpass the older. Yet commentators hesitate to call her a prophet, perhaps because she withholds this revelation from Isaac and later deceives him when he moves to bless Esau. But far from mere guile, her actions mark her as a Kierkegaardian Knight of Faith—acting decisively in service of the divine, much like Abraham at the binding of Isaac.

In the 2nd century C.E., when Christianity emerged as a religion, theologians such as Justin and Chrysostom interpreted Paul’s letters to mean that Christians with faith in Jesus are Abraham’s spiritual descendants through Sarah. Jews, in contrast, are only his flesh descendants, banished like Hagar. Genesis Rabbah responds that after Sarah’s death, Abraham remarried Hagar—now called Keturah, “adorned” (kitra) with commandments and good deeds—and had many more children with her than he did with Sarah.

Samuel must piece together YHWH’s intention to anoint David. Elisha’s plan to save a widow and her sons unfolds in fits and starts.

In the Ugaritic Aqhat Epic (ca. 14th cent. B.C.E., Syria), Danel laughs with unrestrained joy at El’s promise of a son. Why do Abraham and Sarah respond with nervous, uneasy laughter when YHWH makes the same promise?

In Achaemenid royal ideology, the Persian kings saw themselves as heirs to the ancient Elamite rulers, even adopting the old Elamite title “King of Anshan.” Thus, the unusual story of Abram the warrior (Genesis 14) defeating the four kings from the east led by Chedorlaomer of Elam reflects the author’s veiled hope for Israel’s triumph over its Persian overlords: if it happened in the past, it can happen again.

Hagar’s flight from Sarai is more than a story of mistreatment and divine mercy toward a maidservant. Like Moses, Hagar’s journey into the wilderness follows the contours of the fugitive hero pattern, yet examining how her story adapts this pattern sheds new light on its unexpected details and narrative turns.

Why did ancient Jewish and Christian authors attribute books, both real and imagined, to Adam and Eve, their daughters, Seth, Enosh, Kainan, Mahalalel, Jared, Enoch, Lamech, Noah, and Shem?

The language of Canaan, שׂפת כנען, Judahite, יהודית, Hebrew, עברית, or the holy language, לשון הקודש—what name did Jews and Samaritans use?

Written by a Jew in the 2nd century B.C.E., The Letter of Aristeas tells how Demetrius of Phalerum advised King Ptolemy II (3rd cent. B.C.E.) that the Library of Alexandria should commission a Greek translation of the otherwise inaccessible Jewish Torah. At the king’s request, Eleazar, the High Priest of the Jerusalem Temple, sends high-quality manuscripts and seventy-two translators—six from each Israelite tribe—who so impress the Hellenistic king and his court with the Torah’s universal wisdom that he offers to pay them to remain in Egypt.

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.

Among Solomon’s many foreign wives, only Pharaoh’s daughter receives individualized attention—but why does her story center on Solomon’s building projects?

The kingdom of Israel was destroyed in the 8th century B.C.E., but the name Israel lived on. During the Second Temple period, who called themselves Israelites, and who were the Jews? A close look at the Bible, Josephus, and other sources reveals a simple answer—and exposes the anti-Jewish bias behind the infamous “insider/outsider” theory.

​Originally, Deuteronomy presented itself as the torah, and even after its incorporation into the Pentateuch, it retains a distinct identity, which is why the Septuagint translates mishneh torah (Deuteronomy 17:18) as deuteronomium, “Second Torah.” At the same time, with the canonization of the Pentateuch, the role of the “second Torah” was claimed by: Jubilees, some Dead Sea Scrolls, Philo, early Christians, and ultimately the rabbis, culminating in the composition of the Mishnah. A millennium later, Maimonides presented his Mishneh Torah as the (so-far) complete and final embodiment of that second revelation.

The Yom Kippur ritual included two goats. One was sacrificed to God. What happened to the second one, the so-called scapegoat?

In the Bible, dates are generally by regnal years. Over time, several different counting systems developed, counting from: the exodus, the jubilee or sabbatical years, the building of the First Temple, its destruction, the building of the Second Temple, and its destruction. In postbiblical times, documents were dated according to the Seleucid era, and this remained standard for contracts well into the medieval period. Beginning in late antiquity, counting from creation emerged as one of many options, and only became the consensus in relatively recent times.

The precise origins of the practice of reading from the prophets in the synagogue are unknown, but early evidence can be seen in the story of Jesus visiting the synagogue in his hometown on Shabbat and reading from Isaiah (Luke 4:16–19). Yet the process of making prophetic scripture relevant to a contemporary audience began even earlier, as we see in the second-century B.C.E. book of Baruch.

In ancient Judah, death was a two-step journey: the body was laid in a tomb, and the spirit passed to She’ol. Ancestral spirits were believed to influence the fortunes of the living and could be consulted, as when Saul summons Samuel through the woman of Endor, who exclaims, “I see an ʾelohim coming up from the earth.” Biblical authors rejected these practices and replaced them, establishing communal ancestors entombed in the cave of Machpelah and asserting that YHWH Elohim alone can intervene to ensure fertility, land, and well-being.

The Tikkunei Zohar, a kabbalistic work composed in 14^th-century Spain, offers seventy interpretations of the Torah’s first word, bereshit. This article traces how: The understanding of the Torah as multivocal culminated in its formulation, “the Torah has seventy faces,” in the 12^th-century Numbers Rabbah (Part 1). The Tikkunei Zohar saw this as a key theological principle and applied it programmatically (Part 2). R. Nathan Spira and Ramchal interpreted other words of Torah, and Rabbi Nachman of Breslov wrote his famous stories to prepare readers for the Torah’s seventy meanings (Part 3).

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.