Latest Essays

When does God reward and when does God inflict punishment and why? A comparison of the books of Kings and Chronicles demonstrates that the Chronicler, troubled by the theology of Kings in which children can be punished for the sins of their parents, rewrote Israel’s history.

The Difference between God’s “Name (שם)” and “Presence (כבוד)”

Deuteronomy prohibits certain groups from “enter[ing] the assembly of YHWH,” לא יבואו בקהל י־הוה, which likely reflects a ban on citizenship. Nevertheless, the oldest and most commonly known explanation for the term is as a prohibition against marriage, an interpretation already found in Kings and Ezra-Nehemiah.

Deuteronomy’s law of the rebellious son (Deuteronomy 21:18–21) poses numerous problems. Like the rabbis, Josephus interprets the law, but his conclusions are quite different.

Deuteronomy requires Israelite soldiers to carry a shovel with them for covering their feces, outside the war camp, because God is in the camp. The Qumranites and Karaites assume that feces must be impure, while the rabbis extend the law to include times of prayer and Torah study, and maintaining human decency at all times.

The original laws of the slandering husband (מוציא שם רע) and the Sotah woman accused of adultery — both take one party’s guilt as a given. Each of these laws was subsequently redacted in a way that eliminated the automatic assumption of guilt.

Reading the Succession Narrative as anti-monarchic Greek tragedy.

Deuteronomy’s legal system is complex, combining descriptions of how law actually functioned with elements of ideal law.

Decades before Facebook, blogs, and the Internet, at a time Orthodoxy was trying to distinguish itself from the Conservative movement, ten Orthodox thinkers responded to the question of what the divine revelation of the Torah meant in Orthodox Judaism. Did they meet the challenge of Biblical Criticism?

Leviticus requires covering the blood of undomesticated animals; Deuteronomy requires pouring out the blood of slaughtered domesticated animals onto the ground. How do these laws jibe with each other? The Essenes have one answer, the rabbis another, the academics a third.

The Cow That Laid an Egg (!)

Bewildered, Rashi asks: why does Deuteronomy record Aaron’s death at Moserah, not Mt. Hor as in Numbers? Also, why does this scene intrude in the middle of Moses’ description of his (second) forty-day stay upon Mount Horeb? Indeed, Rashi is picking up on an editorial insertion.

Illustrations From Parashat Ekev

A careful examination of the three oldest copies of the Decalogue—4QDeutⁿ, 4QPaleoExodus^m, and the Nash Papyrus—surprisingly shows that none of them reflects the Masoretic Text.

Theologians of the ancient Near East made sense of idolatry through the ritual dedication of the statues that made them into gods.

A Roman foundation myth is highly reminiscent of the abduction of the dancing girls in the book of Judges: A closer look at the Talmud’s description of Tu B’Av reveals a revolutionary, therapeutic recasting of the traumatic biblical story.

A New Reading of Psalm 95

A border dispute between Northern Israel and Moab is recorded independently in the Torah and the Mesha Stele. Comparing these accounts uncovers the underlying issues that the Torah is addressing.