Exciting News! + An article on idolatry in Kriat Yam Suf
So, very exciting news that I got just a last night - I was informed by the editors of the journal Megadim that my article has been accepted for publication. They just recommended a few small corrections. Once I send in the final draft they'll start preparing it for publication, presumably for the next volume (64).
Don't remember if I've shared in the past, but I can sure share now that the article suggests a new interpretation for the difficultly-phrased verse in Melachim 2:15:25:
"וַיִּקְשֹׁר עָלָיו פֶּקַח בֶּן רְמַלְיָהוּ שָׁלִישׁוֹ וַיַּכֵּהוּ בְשֹׁמְרוֹן בְּאַרְמוֹן בֵּית מלך [הַמֶּלֶךְ] אֶת אַרְגֹּב וְאֶת הָאַרְיֵה וְעִמּוֹ חֲמִשִּׁים אִישׁ מִבְּנֵי גִלְעָדִים וַיְמִיתֵהוּ וַיִּמְלֹךְ תַּחְתָּיו."
"His aide, Pekah son of Remaliah, conspired against him and struck him down in the royal palace in Samaria; with (?) Argob and the Arieh, and with him were fifty Gileadites; and he killed him and succeeded him as king.
The verse describes the assassination of King Pekachyah of Israel by his aide Pekach. The phrase "את ארגב ואת האריה" (with/by Argob and the Arieh/the lion) has long been considered difficult. First, it's unclear who or what an Argob is, nor why there's a definitive article (ה"א הידיעה) before Arieh/lion, yet not one before Argob. Most classic commentators interpreted the two to be personal names of famous warriors, and the words את, ואת name עם, ועם (with, and with). Modern academic scholars have typically supposed that the order of the verse is wrong, or that this phrase was originally located elsewhere in the chapter and we're all scratching our heads because of a very ancient scribal error, whereby some scribe accidentally transposed the words into this verse.
In my article, I argued against most proposals. I proposed a simple linguistic solution for the phrase. The second part of the paper was much more hypothetical, as I also clearly stated there. Having solved the linguistic difficulty, I had to explain the realia behind the verse. Unfortunately, we don't actually know what the word Argob means. So after a lot of thought, I went with a conjectural hypothesis to try to explain the specific word and the verse in general.
I must admit, until receiving the acceptance message, I had been somewhat nervous about my paper, because I recently found out that in the newest volume of the journal Hakirah there's going to be a paper on the meaning of the word Argob. I was worried that the author, Rabbi Reuven Chaim Klein (also a Mi Yodeya member), had come up with the same idea I had come up with. Well, I'm still waiting to get my hands on the latest issue of Hakirah to see what his direction is going to be, but meanwhile I'm pleased that my own idea has also been accepted for publication.
In other news, I came across this interesting Hebrew article that proposes a new explanation for the midrash that states that the angels cried to Hashem during the parting of the sea that Bnei Yisrael were idolaters and didn't deserve to be saved. The article discusses different versions of this tradition and concludes with a suggestion to what the idolatry was. I won't spoiler it any further right now. I recommend checking it out.
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