Latest Essays

The “Other” Benefits of Partners

Behind the story of Jacob’s struggle with his older twin Esau, stands a political allegory, reflecting how Israel (=Jacob) first dominated Edom (=Esau) in the 10th-9th centuries B.C.E. and then lost control over it in the late 8th century.

In 1305, the great Catalonian Sage, Rashba, tried to limit philosophic study and interpretation of Torah in Languedoc (southern France). In the process, he and went so far as to excommunicate one of the great scholars involved in such philosophical readings of Torah, Levi ben Avraham ben Hayyim of Villefranche-de-Conflent.

Abraham’s servant says that his master told him to take a wife for Isaac from his family, but Abraham said no such thing. Why does the servant say this and why did medieval pashtanim ignore this blatant discrepancy?

Deuteronomy reflects influence from ancient Wisdom traditions, such as those in the book of Proverbs and in other ancient Near Eastern literature. Yet Deuteronomy presents Torah as Israel’s own Wisdom teaching. This serves both to elevate Torah and to insist that it be in dialogue with the broader, non-Israelite world.

Taking the edge off God’s command to Abraham that he sacrifice his son, and Abraham’s compliance.

Maimonides believes that any story in the Bible with angels is a prophetic vision. Nahmanides calls this position “forbidden to believe” and claims they are real occurrences. Must the Torah be historically true or just philosophically?

Is the purification ritual or spiritual?

The key: Where was the author of the Table of Nations in Genesis 10 located?

The historical association of Abraham and Nimrod with Zoroaster, the founder of Zoroastrianism

Noah awakens from his drunken slumber, and realizes what his youngest son, Ham, did to him. Why, then, does Noah curse his grandson Canaan? Originally, Canaan was the perpetrator and was actually Noah’s youngest son.

Before Noah became the protagonist of the Israelite flood story, his original place in Israelite historiography was as the ancient farmer who discovered wine, bringing the world relief from the toil of work caused by God’s cursing the soil.

A methodologically rigorous reading of the account of the Woman's creation reveals a fundamentally egalitarian view of the sexes that is both nuanced and psychologically sensitive.

Reading Cain’s murder of Abel and the account of Cain’s descendants as a metaphor for the trajectory of human development and the change in patterns of human behavior.

Divine beings come to earth and have offspring with human women (Genesis 6). What is a story which sounds like a pagan myth doing in the Torah?

Literature and art are replete with images of angels descending to earth and joining humanity. One source for this image is a terse account in Genesis describing fallen angels, which is expanded upon in Second Temple literature. This interpretive tradition is suppressed in the classic rabbinic literature only to resurface again in the late narrative midrash, Pirqe de-Rabbi Eliezer.

On a mountain, in a valley, no one knows – the three traditions about where Moses is buried in Deuteronomy 34 stem from three different sources.

A Post-Destruction model of Jewish Identity: Reading and studying Torah as if our life depended on it.

The Rabbis describe how the ritual of ניסוך המים (water libation), which they believed was to have occurred every Sukkot in the Temple, was a point of contention between the Pharisees and the Sadducees, but why was it so contentious and what was at stake in its performance?

Despite its pious content, especially when seen against Kohelet, the book of Ben Sira (Ecclesiasticus) was not canonized and today has been marginalized. This was not always the case. Ben Sira held a prominent place in earlier Jewish, and even rabbinic, communities.

The scribes who wrote the addendum to the laws of Sukkot (Leviticus 23:42-43) used inner-biblical exegesis to explain the requirement to dwell in booths as a commemoration for the miraculous booths (not clouds) that God created for the Israelites at their first stop on the way to freedom.