Volume 23, 2023

EN:

Jeremiah 32 exhibits a complex combination of the contrasting motifs of disaster and restoration. The present article argues that these twofold contents of the chapter reflect its original literary function as a hinge between the Book of Consolation (Jer 30–31) and the stories about Judah’s collapse (Jer 34–45). Due to later developments, Jer 32 lost its original hinge function, as the chapter was integrated into the expanded Book of Consolation (Jer 30–33).

EN:

Uzziah ruled in Judah for many years, yet the description of his rule in the book of Kings is laconic. The book of Chronicles, on the other hand, provides an extensive description of his reign that stems from authorial ideology, theology, and processes of identity formation. The book of Ezra-Nehemiah describes a series of confrontations from four directions, with Uzziah’s battles with the Philistines, the Arab tribes, and the Ammonites being three of these fronts. The Chronicler, writing several decades after Ezra-Nehemiah, was aware of the Ezra-Nehemiah text or its narrative, and developed the figure of Uzziah as a great king, thus serving his own national, economic, ethnic, and religious goals.

EN:

The relationship between the calamities of Joel 1:2-2:11 remains an unsettled problem. This article contributes to discussion of the problem by attending to what the speakers in the text envision as the outcome of those calamities. Joel 2:17 is proposed as an interpretive aid, and suggestions that the wording there is ambiguous or polysemous are examined; a close analysis of syntax there and of the valence of transformative נת״נ affirms the reading of the ancient versions over against claims of inclarity or wordplay. Although the locust plague is juxtaposed and metaphorically intermingled with the invading army, the text’s speakers at this point envision the outcome of the calamities not only as agricultural disaster but also as foreign domination. While in the text the agricultural disaster is a fait accompli, the second calamity may still be averted. The possibilities of agricultural restoration and foreign domination become literary goads; the addressees are spurred to act in their own self-interest, which is entangled with the deity’s.

EN:

Scholarship has been divided on whether there is any reference to the exodus in the books of Ezra-Nehemiah and Esther. In this article, it is argued that although both books do refer to the exodus, they do not necessarily refer to the book of Exodus. Rather than approaching this problem from the perspective of intertextuality, the article studies the use of exodus motifs as a narratological phenomenon. It compares the way that two texts, one from the diaspora and one from Yehud, use exodus motifs to support their own agendas. In each text, the exodus acts as a model for a type of salvation.

EN:

After Edna Engel and Mordechay Mishor had discovered that two fragments with excerpts from the book of Exodus belonged to a single Torah scroll dating from the seventh or eighth century CE, Mordechai Veintrob identified thirteen additional fragments of the same scroll, most of them coming from the Cairo Genizah. This article shows that in the preserved fragments no orthographic differences occur with the (partially reconstructed) text of the more recent Aleppo Codex, while there are such orthographic differences with the other ancient Bible codices. The relationship between the ancient scroll and the Aleppo Codex is looser as far as the sectional division by means of petuḥot and setumot is concerned. However, the tradition according to which five specific lines must be written above the text of the Song of the Sea (Exod 15:1–19) seems to have this very scroll as its source. This tradition was followed in the Aleppo Codex and other ancient codices.

EN:

In the twentieth century, at two crucial instances, comparisons with ancient Greek traditions played an important role in forwarding the argument in favor of the early origins of the pentateuchal narrative: Martin Noth’s “amphictyonic hypothesis” and Frank Moore Cross’s account of the Israelite “epic.” This article argues that success of these arguments owes to a hidden “parallelomania” at work in the mid-century, which successfully made the evidence of ancient Greek phenomena seem like something that it was not in service to desirable arguments. Finally, it explores how contemporary approaches can avoid repeating past mistakes.