Tanach Thoughts

Couple of interesting tidbits I came across earlier today while perusing various manuscripts of Rashi's commentary on the Torah in search of variants of one particular passage (more on that perhaps some other time): 1. In Ms. HUCA JCF 1, fol. 41r, an artist drew the kohen gadol's choshen (breastplate) and ephod (sleeveless garment below the breastplate. On one side of the ephod, the artist quoted a Tosafistic commentary on the form of the ephod: "האפוד היה כמין שורקוט בלא בתי ידיים." "The ephod was like a kind of sleeveless surcoat." A surcoat was a kind of garment that knights wore over their armor, used to display their coats-of-arms. In other words, the ephod was like a priestly surcoat, and, potentially, the breastplate was the kohen gadol's coat-of-arms. 2. Among the various Temple vessels displayed in the (in)famous scene at Titus's Arch, the vessel that stands out the most is of course the Menorah. A longtime question regarding its design has ...

 I was perusing my files earlier in search of interesting Purim info, and came across an interesting tidbit I had long but forgotten. Yehuda Levi Nachum z"l was a famous collector of Yemenite manuscripts. Not long ago, his collection was donated to the National Library of Israel. Some time last year, I think, while collecting sources for a different project (can't remember what it was), I skimmed some of his published compilations of manuscripts. In the volume מיצירות ספרותיות מתימן (Of Yemenite Literary Works), p. 192, he published a genealogy of a man named Yeshuah ben Aharon (ישועה בן אהרן), which included tracing the man to Yaakov Avinu through Yehudah. What was shocking, however, was that the lineage was not the standard Davidic genealogy (i.e., Yaakov > Yehudah > Peretz > Ram > Aminadav > Nachshon > Salmah/Salmon > Boaz > Oved > Yishai > David >>> [further descendants]), as we find it in Tanachic sources and most later Yehudaic-tri...

Yup, clickbait title. To my chagrin, I have not updated the blog in quite a while. I've considered a few post ideas but never got around to writing them down. I've spread myself too thin in recent months, trying to balance my doctorate, research assistant commitments, personal research projects, and other things. I'm here just to post something small but perhaps significant that caught my attention last night. I was skimming editions of an old scholarly Jewish Studies journal published by Yeshiva University in the 40s-50s (if I'm not mistaken), called Talpiyot (תלפיות; all articles are in Hebrew). In volume 4, issues 3-4 (published in Kislev of 5710 - winter of 1949), pp. 677-691 there's an article by Rabbi Menachem Mendel Kasher entitled "חות דעת ע"ד המגלות הגנוזות" (An Opinion on the Hidden Scrolls). The Hidden Scrolls in the title is an old term sometimes used for the Dead Sea Scrolls, which were still a very new discovery back in late 1949. In fa...

I'm happy to share that my first Tanach paper has been published and is now available online: Hoham, King of Hebron, Jewish Bible Quarterly 53:2 (2025), pp. 87-96. It can be found both on the issue's webpage and on academia.edu .

Just came across this article , which suggests that the Phoenician word פמי (PMY) refers to a lion, and as a theophoric component, it refers to an Egyptian lion god with a similar name. There are several synonyms for lion in Tanach - Aryeh, Kfir, Lavi, Layish, Shachal, perhaps Shachatz - so I wondered whether this suggestion could explain a difficult word in Tanach. A quick search found Chuppim, Muppim, Shuppim and Shefufam - various sons of Binyamin. Muppim's name might come from the Egyptian city of Mof (Memphis). Shuppim and Shefufam might be related to Shefifon, a type of snake. But what about Chuppim? Well, as PMY comes from Egyptian, I checked what Khu (חו) means in Egyptian. And lo, it refers to a part of the soul per the Egyptian conception of the soul. So, potentially, Chuppim's name (Khu + PYM/PM = PMY) could mean "lion's soul". (image taken from here )

According to Shmuel 1:10:21 , Shaul's family was part of a clan called Matri (Matrites). Curiously, in aggadic descriptions of Shaul's full genealogy all the way to Binyamin, Matar or Matri or Matari or something similar is nowhere to be found (see here ). Little is otherwise known about this clan. Ze'ev Erlich thought  that the Matrites lived in what is now known as Khirbet Rimnah, as nearby there's a later site called Khirbet al-Matari - evidently preserving the name of the Matrites. Both sites are located in the vicinity of the Gibdeonite cities, and since it's known that Shaul's family came from that region, this suggestion is quite plausible. The name of the forefather of the family, Matar or Matari or Matri, shares the root of MTR (מט"ר), 'rain' (often referring to abundant rain). However, a few days ago I came across another possibility: This article by Norbert Nebes (p. 19, line 3) mentions that in Ethio-Sabaean, a 1st millennium BCE Semiti...