Tanach Thoughts

 A quick thought I had last night, before getting on to part 2 of the Barak/Devorah posts: I've been troubled in recent months as I realized that I was moving away from my old comfort zone of favoring both P'shat and Drash in understanding Tanach, and moving towards almost an entirely P'shat mentality, grounded in archeological findings and word etymologies, among other things. I was bothered by this because it felt like I was beginning to see the aRDeS part of PaRDeS (P'shat, Remez, Drash and Sod) as meaningless, which I know it's not. But in a sense, it felt like I no longer saw any point in these aspects. Well, I'm still making my through this forest, but I wanted to share a thought I had last night: I was listening to a class on the story of Palti ben Laish and Michal. The question is an oldy: How could Palti marry a married woman (it doesn't say that David divorced Michal) and how could David take back Michal, after all, a man cannot take back his wife ...

I thought I would do something a bit different this time, and perhaps I'll do this again from time to time, which is give my thoughts on a Tanach-related book I've read. Earlier this week, I finished chipping my way through Shaul and Binyamin by Ben Tzion Luria. I thought it was an interesting book, however, it's got one major downside that I'll address shortly. First of all, the upsides: Luria had a fascinating way of breaking down Tanach verses and reading between the lines. He has many fantastic chiddushim in the book and I think it's well-worth reading, even if one - such as myself - doesn't agree 100% with all of his ideas. One of the things I liked best is right in the first chapter: He explains why logically researchers should accept Chazalic traditions about Tanachic events and uses for evidence the Talmudic traditions of the genealogies of certain famous figures from the time. This was an issue that had bothered me since I read Malchut Beit David by Yaa...