Tanach Thoughts

Never mind now what animal the Tanachic Re'em was (my favorite opinion is Rabbi Ahron Marcus's, that it was the elephant, but I am aware that the popular opinion is that it was the Aurochs) , Re'em is usually spelled in Hebrew ראם, but there are some variants: רמים (sing. רם - Tehillim 22:22), ראים (Tehillim 92:11), רים (Iyov 39:9-10). Re'em appears to be connected to the word רם - Ram, great (in size). In other words, we are talking about a large animal. I noticed something interesting a couple of days ago. There are two cities in Tanach said to have been called Ramot - ראמות: One is Ramot in the Gilad ( one of the cities of refuge and a Levitical city - Devarim 4:43, Yehoshua 20:8, Chronicles 1:6:65) and the other is Ramot in the territory of Yissachar (later a Levitical city - Chronicles 1:6:58). Anyway, there's no huge chiddush here, I just find it interesting that the root ראם exists also in the names of cities that were likely high up, topographically-speaking...

A few days ago I was privileged enough to hear a fascinating short TED-sized lecture by one of the doctorate students in my department at university. This student, a rabbi in his profession, spoke about his doctoral thesis which just recently he handed in to the university's review board and was pending a verdict from them. The thesis, which I won't discuss at length here for a number of reasons, the main being that it's still pending a verdict from the board (and the others being that for the most part, it's not Tanach-related), focused on the Mishmarot Kehunah of the Second Temple Era and later. The Mishmarot Kehunah were the divisions of priests that served at set times year-round. Each division served for about two weeks every year and everyone served together on Chol Hamo'ed. Now, I came up to him after the lecture and asked him a question on one aspect of his theory: Per his theory, the four priestly families that came during Shivat Tzion and recreated the pr...

At long last, I can make this long-awaited post to properly explain Schnitzer's view on Dan's fear of boats (not prophets!). Shortly after making the first post , I reread Schnitzer's essay שבט דן והים (The Tribe of Dan and the Sea) and somewhat unsurprisingly, it turned out that I had been in such a hurry to share Schnitzer's chiddush on understanding the term "יגור" that I had dived head-first into a case of mistaken identity. In the previous post, I had written that the Danites had feared the sea-faring Sidonians and so they decided to relocate to northern Israel which bordered on non-sea-faring Sidonian territory. However, this is not what Schnitzer actually wrote. He opined that at the time, the Sidonians had yet to conquer the coastal region. Rather, the terrors of the sea at the time were...the Sea People! The Sea People, for those who don't know, were a mix of different ethnic groups, mostly Aegean in origin but not limited to and included also Ana...

I really hope I'll have time soon for the second Dan's naviphobia post (fear of boats, not prophets), but in the mean time, a quick, short note on Ivtzan: Ivtzan (אבצן) was one of the lesser-known judges, although he was made popular because the Talmud identified  him with Boaz. In one of my earliest posts , I brought some suggestions for the meaning of his name. At the time, I was only aware of a place called תבץ (Tevetz), and that seemed too different for a connection to be made, but a few days ago I discovered that there was also a place called אבץ  (Evetz), so it's possible that his name came from that and his name denotes some sort of connection to that place. Likelihood: I won't get into it too much right now, but there's a debate among both commentators and academic scholars on whether Ivtzan was from the Galilean Beit Lechem or the Judean Beit Lechem . A connection to the Galilean town of Evetz seems to strengthen the Galilean identification.