Posts

Wishful thinking

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Just FYI, this is the fifth post I've started in recent months (on entirely different topics, BTW. Hopefully I will post them eventually). I have an interest in still updating the blog, but I can't find the time to finish posts. Fifth time's the charm, I guess... Sometime ago I got my hands on a copy of Rabbi Ahron Marcus 's commentary on the Medieval book of responsa Shu"t Min Ha'Shamayim , which is a collection of questions and answers, where the questions were posed by the author, Rabbi Yaakov of Marvège, France (ca. 13th century CE), to the Heavenly Court, and he received mystical responses which he interpreted based on a specific kabbalistic method. Rabbi Ahron Marcus, who lived in the 19th-20th centuries, was a prolific author and knowledgeable in many fields, and I've been a huge fan of his writings for several years now (especially his book on the Hebrew language Barzilai, which was fortunately translated into Hebrew [most of what he wrote was in Ge...
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Thousands and Myriads

I read an article on Shabbat which mentioned the famous phrase "והם רבבות אפרים והם אלפי מנשה" - "...These are the myriads of Ephraim, those are the thousands of Manasseh" ( Devarim 33:17 ) and it occurred to me that the same numbering pairing appears also in the song that the women sang after David vanquished the Plishtim: "הכה שאול באלפו ודוד ברבבותיו" - "...Saul has slain his thousands; David, his tens of thousands" ( Shmuel 1:18:7 ). It occurred to me that the phrase from Devarim might better explain why the song caused Shaul so much consternation. After all, it was just a commoners' song celebrating David's military prowess. David was obviously younger than Shaul and therefore logically more capable of defeating a larger number of goons in battle. Was Shaul's reaction simply basic jealousy? I don't think so.  Consider the phrase from Devarim: It describes the younger brother, Ephraim, overtaking the older brother, Menashe, in...
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Of Knights, Dragons, and Ma'aseh Ha'Mishkan

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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 ...
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David's full genealogy?

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 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...
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Book of the Wars of the LORD - found???

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...
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First published Tanach paper!

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 .
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The Meaning of Chuppim?

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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 )
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