Tanach Thoughts

So, a few minutes ago I submitted another Tanach-related paper to a fairly good Israeli Tanach journal. This is not my Levitical Cities paper. I decided to take an extended break from that one to clear my head and finish my BA schoolwork. During my spare time, I focused on three projects in particular: Two Tanach papers and a midrash paper. So, the first of these papers, which was submitted today, is about a curious verse in Melachim, which Biblical Criticism scholars have (naturally) thought to be distorted. I propose in the paper two chiddushim: The first explains why the verse is not distorted and in fact can be explained easily based on a phenomenon found in colloquial Hebrew throughout the ages (yup - from Tanachic times [including epigraphic sources!!] through modern Israeli Hebrew). The second proposes a new interpretation for the verse as a whole, drawing on symbolism and comparison to many other sources. I'd love to share more, but I'd like to see this thing get throug...

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...

 I was originally planning for the post title to be "Zecher Leyetziat Mitzrayim or Zecher Leyetziat Mitzrayim?" but you can't emphasize words in post titles, so I nixed that. This post is a callback to one of my very first posts, almost a year ago, here . I was troubled then by the implications of claims made by various people that basically the whole Torah was based on the culture and religion of other ancient nations, Egypt in particular. Well, actually, I wasn't really troubled by the implications. B"H my faith is strong. I was more troubled about the fact that more and more people were coming to accept this notion as though it was the simple, clear truth. The main problem I see is that not only it makes out Hashem to be a copyist and unoriginal, but it also seems to remove from the Torah its eternal aspect: How could it be eternal if everything in it came to reflect some such civilization that the Israelites had happened to come into contact with and decided ...

  (Image from Shay Charka 's נגיד שבבא בתנ"ך (highly recommended)) Ask just about any bible academic, and they'll tell you that whoever authored Chronicles was basically writing pro-Davidic propaganda. Okay, pro-Davidic-- as opposed to what? Pro-Shaulian, of course. That's right, Am Yisrael's first official king (setting aside whatever halachic status Moshe may have held, and also, l'havdil, setting aside Avimelech, son of Gidon), King Shaul, while mentioned in Chronicles, doesn't get that much limelight, certainly nowhere close to that of David (David's kingdom covers almost all of Chronicles 1, and most of Chronicles 2 is dedicated to his descendants' stories). Bible critics are quick to notice this, and generally deduce that this means that the author of Chronicles was anti-Shaul and pro-Davidic, and did everything in his power to reduce Shaul's role in the history of Am Yisrael. Now me, I believe in our sages' tradition that Chronicles ...

(image by Gustave  Doré, taken from here ) It is well known that biblical critics are immensely bothered by the Book of Yesha'ayahu. The reason that they are bothered by it is not  because it's, as they claim, made up of two to fifty (roughly) different books of different prophets, of whom only one is named (Yesha'ayhu I), but really because they deny the very possibility of prophecy. To them, prophets were the ancient world's equivalent of thinkers and political advisors. No spiritual capabilities whatsoever. As long as the prophets gave generalized apocalyptic "prophecies" that could mean anything and may not even come true, the prophets were in the clear. No, what really bothers critics is when prophets got something right . Then the prophet is a goner: He or she will be pushed from their classically-accepted era to the future, a time in which everyone  knew what had transpired, thus removing any real prophetic abilities from them. But what really bothers c...