Latest Essays

A male priest recites and inscribes a curse that the sotah is compelled to orally ingest and disclose the “truth” without listening to her words. Set in the wilderness period, and framed as a narrative passed down from mother to daughter, the short story of Iʿezer and Shifra by David Frischmann (a 20th century Hebrew fiction writer) highlights how, when she is accused of being a sotah, Shifra’s ignorance of Torah dooms her.

The story has a comic undergirding as Naomi and Ruth teach the staid patriarch Boaz a humanitarian lesson.

When Boaz sees Ruth gleaning in the field, and learns who she is, he offers her protection from his own workers’ predatory behavior, giving us a glimpse at what poor women, gleaning in the field, had to contend with.

Despite its name in tradition, the story revolves around Naomi—her feelings and her needs.

With its sensitively portrayed characters and quotidian contexts, the story of Ruth and Naomi underscores questions about the good path in life, the choices we make, and especially the role of the deity who controls all. The narrative also touches upon a wide array of issues concerning gender, economic deprivation, the status of the migrant, and other matters.

At the heart of the life and career of Moshe Greenberg, z”l, was a search for spiritual meaning through the scholarly study of the Bible.

Jacob and Samson celebrate their marriages for seven days. The earliest mention of marriage ​blessings, however, is in the apocryphal book of Tobit and the Dead Sea Scrolls, both from the late second Temple times. 3, 5, 6 and even 7 blessings circulated in Jewish society before the rabbis formalized the series as the “Sheva Berakhot” by early medieval times. Their recitation by guests ​​during the celebratory week was promoted by the rabbis as occasions to engage in an “act of lovingkindness” ​(gemilut ḥasadim).​

The Shavuot rebellion and consequent burning of the Temples’ porticoes during the time of Augustus Caesar made no impression on subsequent Jewish historiography, despite the later humiliating defeat of the rebellion’s suppressor, Varus, in the Battle of Teutoburg Forest. Another lost memory of Shavuot is the all-night vegetarian feast, prayer, and Torah study of the Therapeutae, an egalitarian ascetic Jewish community in Egypt.

Hosea’s depiction of the marital relations with a promiscuous woman, as a metaphor for YHWH’s relationship with Israel, is problematic in ancient and modern terms. The structure of Hosea 2, however, suggests that we have been overlooking the prophet’s message: YHWH rejects and repudiates violence in favor of gentle persuasion and courtship.

The rabbis distinguish four stages in the fetus’ development towards personhood. For the duration of the pregnancy, until the commencement of active labor, “a fetus is like its mother’s thigh” (עוּבָּר יֶרֶךְ אִמוֹ).

What we know about abortion in the ancient world from legal and medical texts.

Why the promiscuous daughter of a priest and Tamar, the widowed daughter-in-law of Judah, are sentenced to die by fire. The “poetic justice” of immolation.

The absence of an explicit prohibition in the Torah against father-daughter incest led to a debate among the talmudic-era rabbis, and eventually among medieval Rabbanites and Karaites, about whether such a prohibition should be derived from a logical a fortiori (קל וחומר) argument or from a hermeneutic (גזרה שוה) one.

Egyptian and Mesopotamian abortion-inducing recipes attest to the practice of abortion in the ancient Near East. While the Middle Assyrian Laws prohibit the practice, the Torah offers no ruling. Nevertheless, throughout the Bible, expressions like נִשְׁמַת חַיִּים, “the breath of life” (Genesis 2:7), imply that life begins at first breath.

A hoard of 406 astragali (“knucklebones”), a bone that was used for divination in the ancient world, was discovered at Tel Abel Beth Maacah. Was this city, featured in the rebellion of Sheba against King David, a center for divination?

On Yom Kippur, one goat is sacrificed to YHWH and another is sent to Azazel in the wilderness. Who is Azazel? The 12^th-century commentator Abraham ibn Ezra hints that the answer lies in reaching 33.

In Priestly law, impurity is stripped of its mythic origins in the demonic realm but still retains its dangerous, physical presence, and must be mitigated by specific acts of ritual cleansing and banishing, depending on the type of impurity. Purification from the skin disease tzaraʿat (Leviticus 13–14) offers the starkest example of such a ritual.

Deuteronomy and Leviticus drew on common Vorlage (source text) to develop their regulations about the consumption of land, marine, and winged creatures. While Deuteronomy only lightly modifies this Vorlage, the editors of Leviticus expanded the text in several stages to align it with Priestly ideology.

In verses 2–31, YHWH is a mythic warrior, with smoke coming from his nostrils, riding a cherub and wielding weapons of lightning and thunder against the enemy. In contrast, in verses 32–51, YHWH strengthens and equips the psalmist to fight his own battles. The combined psalm celebrates YHWH’s complex involvement in human affairs.

Royal lovers, a female goatherd and male shepherd, King Solomon and his bride, an urban relationship that ends violently, and a sister and her protective brothers. Is it possible to read these episodes as a single love story?

We invited our authors and friends to share practices, ideas, experiences, and analyses from their own seders that enhance their seder-night experience.

Known by the acronym Pardes, four approaches—peshat, the literal, remez, the philosophical-allegorical, derash, the midrashic-allegorical, and sod, the mystical—can be found not only in commentaries on the Song of Songs but also in a variety of musical settings.

The seventh part of the qedushta for the ancient triennial Torah reading וַיְהִי בַּחֲצִי הַלַּיְלָה, “It Came to Pass at Midnight,” was preserved in the Haggadah. This is the only poem of Yannai’s (ca. 5th/6th cent. C.E.) to be retained in the liturgy.

Abraham, Hagar, Moses, and Gideon all encounter the angel of YHWH. What is this divine being and how are we to understand its relationship to YHWH?

“You shall not abhor an Egyptian, for you were a sojourner in that land” (Deuteronomy 23:8). Many biblical references to Israel’s sojourn in Egypt do not mention slavery and oppression and describe how the Israelites worked their own fields, owned homes, were friendly with neighbors, and had delicious food.