Latest Essays

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 this psalm when pandemics and other disasters often hit the weakest and most vulnerable the hardest?

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 biblical precept “you shall love your neighbor as yourself” has long been understood in Jewish and Christian circles as universal, a transcendent principle encompassing the whole Torah. However, in Leviticus, it is actually one of many action-oriented commandments focused on Israelite social cohesion.

After giving birth to a male, the mother is impure for 7 days, followed by 33 days of purification. However, with a female, the mother is impure for 14 days, followed by 66 days of purification.

Mesopotamian gynecological texts and what we know about women’s postpartum flow help us parse the unusual Hebrew idiom demei tohorah, literally “bloods of purity” (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.

R. Eleazar of Worms in the 12^th century, defended the practice of spilling wine when reciting the plagues against detractors who disparaged it, by offering a mystical, numerological rationale. This, however, was a post-facto attempt to explain a folk custom, whose origins lie in the human fear of being struck by these very plagues.

The Talmud requires having two unspecified cooked dishes to be eaten as part of the Passover meal. How did this requirement develop into the custom of placing two particular symbolic foods, the shankbone and the egg, on the seder plate?

The popular Jewish custom to remove drops of wine while listing the plagues goes back to the Middle Ages, but the ubiquitous explanation that we do this out of sadness for what happened to the Egyptians does not. When did this explanation develop and how did it become so dominant?

Psalm 114, a late psalm, is exceptional in its structure and content.  These tightly structured eight verses, which reflect several non-Torah traditions, use Egypt symbolically, to encourage the exiles to return from Babylonia.

The real reason Persia’s King Darius II sent a letter to the governor of Egypt that Judean soldiers in Elephantine should keep the festival of Matzot.

Three descriptive poems in the Song of Songs wrestle with the experience of being in the beloved’s presence. In each case, the woman’s body is described using layered landscape imagery and complex, overlapping angles of vision. These poems ask us to consider what it means to see.

Abraham, Jacob, and the Israelites in Egypt acquire wealth from foreign peoples in morally ambiguous ways. In contrast, the Judeans’ return from exile, depicted as a second exodus, is accomplished with the blessing of the gentile king, and the wealth obtained in exile is entirely untainted.

A burnt offering, must be whole (תמים), after which it is dismembered (נתוח) and offered to YHWH. In the wake of the loss of my parents, I have come to appreciate how this process mirrors the creation story and life.

Drawing on biblical and ancient Near Eastern evidence about the consequences of swearing falsely, I suggest a new understanding of the asham case (Lev 5:20-26) involving property violation and a subsequent false oath.

Who needs the Tabernacle? What is the purpose of sacrifices? Maimonides and Nahmanides have radically different answers to these questions, reflecting a core debate about the nature of Judaism and the purpose of its rituals.

Why does God need an opulent dwelling, with precious metals and jewels, and priests with lush colored outfits? According to Maimonides, God doesn’t; it is we who need it.

The evidence seems compelling.

A midrash on the phrase venikdash bikhevodi, “and it shall be sanctified by my glory” (Exod 29:43) suggests that God is unusually strict when He punishes those who are close to Him. Rashbam strenuously objected to this popular midrash.

Hidden behind the strange rabbinic definition of walled cities is a polemical response to the notorious claim of Emperor Hadrian, who rebuilt Jerusalem as the pagan city Aelia Capitolina.

A midrash imagines Queen Esther reciting Psalm 22 the moment she was about to enter Ahasuerus' inner court. Are the rabbis responding to the Passion Narrative, in which Jesus, in his final moments, recites this lament on the cross?