Latest Essays

Joshua circumcises the Israelites only upon their entry to the land.

Before the Babylonian conquest of Jerusalem, Ezekiel condemns Judah's alliance with Egypt, depicting Egypt and its pharaoh as a monster that YHWH will destroy. The prophet accuses Judah of harlotry with Egypt and blames their foolish alliance on their resurgent worship of the Egyptian gods they adopted during their sojourn there.

Biblical authors employed the number 7 in numerous ways to express the ideas of completion, perfection, and holiness and to highlight keywords or elements within a text.

With the loss of the Temple, wearing Shabbat clothes conveys the כָּבוֹד וּתִפְאָרֶת, “glory and splendor” of the priestly garments.

What happens to Moses’ face after his encounter with God on the mountain: Does he radiate light or grow horns? Ancient Near Eastern iconography can help us understand what Exodus 34:29–35 is trying to communicate.

Post-exilic scribes challenged priestly authority by supplementing the Tabernacle texts with a second Ohel Moed, Tent of Meeting, where Moses appoints the 70 elders. In contrast to the Priestly Tabernacle, any Israelite can go to this Tent of Meeting to speak with God. 

Jeroboam makes two golden calves, and sets them up at Dan and Bethel. Post-exilic biblical scribes revised this archetypal act of apostasy by introducing a new version of the same sin set in a more ancient period: Aaron's Golden Calf at the foot of Mount Sinai.

It is clear in the Bible and ancient Near Eastern texts that men were sorcerers, yet Exodus 22:17 seems to single out women in its command, “You shall not permit a witch to live.”

The manner in which Haman’s execution was depicted had real world consequences.

A political strategy and a religious wakeup call to Jews in the Diaspora.

Esther is the most beloved biblical figure among the crypto-Jews of the Spanish Inquisition—the conversos (fem. conversas)—who publicly converted to Catholicism but lived secretly as Jews. Remarkably, she was also upheld as a heroine among the Catholic-majority communities of early modern Iberia (Spain and Portugal), but for very different reasons.

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In 1902, Friedrich Delitzsch argued in his Babel und Bibel (Babylon and the Bible) lecture series that the biblical texts are dependent upon and inferior to those of Babylonia. A key piece of evidence was the Hammurabi Stele, discovered only months before, but traditional scholars responded by maintaining the ethical superiority of Mosaic law.

Julius Wellhausen’s analysis of the Torah is perfused with the anti-Jewish sentiment prevalent in Bismarck’s Second German Reich. This adversely affected the use of the Documentary Hypothesis among Jewish scholars until Yehezkel’s Kaufmann’s introduction of a Jewish variation on the theory.

The Torah’s prohibition against loaning money with interest addresses a culture of subsistence farmers. Later Jews devised halakhic loopholes to enable them to make use of credit instruments such as the suftaja and to participate in market economies.

Rashi’s Torah commentary is largely adapted from classic rabbinic sources, including midrash halakhah. And yet, he often changes their meaning in his revisions. Where does Rashi get the authority to make these changes?

The answer, or lack thereof, teaches us something important about the meaning and limits of divine revelation.

The Book of Joshua describes Israel waging a military campaign against Jericho and other southern cities. The Song of the Sea (Exodus 15), on the other hand, depicts Israel crossing the Jordan, and YHWH bringing them directly to a temple.

The Hyksos, the West Semitic rulers of northern Egypt in the late 16th century B.C.E., are the biblical Pharaohs and their lower-class subjects, the Hebrews. Here is the history behind the exodus.

Village dogs, guard dogs, scavenger dogs, and dog burials—what archaeology and the Bible can tell us about dogs in ancient Egypt and the Levant, and the significance of their silence during the plague of the firstborn.

In ancient Egyptian belief, a person’s heart was weighed after death to determine whether they are righteous or wicked. By referring to Pharaoh’s heart as heavy, the exodus story originally expressed the extent of his guilt.

Three curious details in the plagues of blood and frogs show the hand of a post-priestly editor and his concern about purity laws.

The story of the ancestors in Genesis serves as a prequel to that of Moses in Exodus. Originally, however, each were self-standing accounts of Israel’s origin. They were combined for the first time by the Priestly author in the post-exilic period.

YHWH’s first revelation to Moses at a sneh סְּנֶה, “bush,” signifies that it is not a future site of worship and foreshadows the revelation at Sinai.