Tanach Thoughts

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 ...

Yesterday, Shabbat of Chol Hamo'ed Pesach 5784, I said a Dvar Torah by my grandparents' שיחיו house. The DT was about the subject of the Israelites having "borrowed" wealth from the Egyptians. It was essentially a combination of what Dr. Aton M. Holzer wrote here and my answer here  on Mi Yodeya. The gist is that while different answers have been given over the millennia as to why it was okay for the Israelites to take the Egyptian wealth, apparently only Dr. Holzer has provided a reasonable explanation for why they claimed they were merely "borrowing". He suggested that the borrowing was based on a Hittite ritual similar to the Israelite scapegoat ritual (more on that, see here , pp. 16-17) where the Hittites adorned two slaves, a bull and an ewe with gold and colorful wool and sent them away to take away a plague caused by an angry enemy deity. The Israelites told the Egyptians they would take the 10 plagues from Egypt but they had to do it properly: adorn...

In memory of Gavriel ben David Blum z"l, killed in Gaza last week. Yesterday I paid a shiva call to the Blum family whose son Gavriel, whom I knew in high school, was sadly killed last week in Gaza. They recounted a story that I think his friends told them when they visited the night before. It's the sort of story that makes me uncomfortable (and his father did hesitate for a moment before telling it to the crowd, but his mother okayed it). Today I thought about it again and found a kernel of connection to Torah, with an emphasis on the story of the Exodus, now being read in shuls around the world, so I think it's worth getting over the uncomfortable bit. As our sages taught: תורה היא, וללמוד אני צריך! (This is Torah, and I must learn!) One day, a group of higher-ups visited the area in Gaza where Gavriel's unit was staying. The soldiers were tending to various military assignments, and the higher-ups, including several very high-ranking officers and a member of the so...

On this blog I've discussed a couple of times the Exodus and archeology (see here and here ). Recently, I have been thinking to myself that perhaps the lack of hard evidence means something. True, there's a loose collection of findings (such as the Ipuwer Papyrus or the Book of Gates (see here )) that many Bible-believers hold to be evidence of the Exodus, but since they have all been dismissed by academic scholars in a manner that has lulled the world into a belief that there is zero evidence for the Exodus, it is difficult to consider them hard evidence. Not impossible, just difficult. Which led me to think that perhaps there's a reason for us not having found hard evidence for the Exodus, i.e., something that will completely knock the socks off of academia, and that is that the Exodus stands as a challenge to our generation: Will you believe or will you deny? Look at it this way: Although we have not yet found evidence for portions of the Tanach, it is no longer (compa...

Yes, the title is a misnomer. The question was originally asked by the Mechilta on the verse . And that question is as follows: ""And he took six hundred choice chariots" ( 14:7 ): Whence came the horses required for the chariots? If you would say, from Egypt, is it not written (Ibid. 9:6) "and all the cattle of Egypt died"? And if you would say, from Pharaoh, is it not written (Ibid. 3) "Behold, the hand of the Lord is in your cattle in the field, in the horses, etc."? And if you say, from Israel, is it not written (Ibid. 10:26) "And our cattle, too, will go with us; not a hoof will remain"? Whence, then, did they come?" Now, the Mechilta goes on to explain that the horses belonged to those Egyptians who feared Hashem and listened to Moshe's warnings during the plagues that killed the domesticated animals. But earlier this evening I thought of two other possibilities: 1. The midrash in Shemot Rabbah 10:2 says (loose translation): ...

 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 ...

Earlier this week I heard a class  by Rabbi Yoel Elitzur, where he demonstrated why the popular view of the Exodus - for those that believe it happened - happened in the 13th century BCE. Later that day, or the next, I heard a class  by Dr. Aryeh Borenstein where he explained why - when accepting the p'shat or simple understanding of the Tanachic text - the Exodus must be dated to 1442 BCE. Both classes were given during the same Charedi archeological convention - Mitachat Lifnei Hashetach 3 - and both lecturers brought mountains of archeological evidence to strengthen their views. I found it interesting that the Exodus is viewed as a practically timeless event, and it seems that this even extends backwards, to the Exodus itself and even before that, it seems. It appears that the Exodus could, in fact, have happened in many different generations; several different Egyptian dynasties seem to fit. In the infamous words of Ollivander: "Curious! Very curious." Or as they say,...

Note: The following is a translation of a dvar Torah I wrote earlier for my yeshiva's weekly newsletter. In our upcoming parsha, Shemot, we start reading about the harsh slavery of Bnei Yisrael in Egypt. These events are quite puzzling, considering the verse in the beginning of the parsha: "But the Israelites were fertile and prolific; they multiplied and increased very greatly, so that the land was filled with them." This puzzlement grows even more when we discover what it meant, exactly, that Bnei Yisrael were "prolific" and "increased very greatly", as described in Seder Hadorot: "And the sons of Esav prepared to do battle with the sons of Yaakov...and of the sons of Esav 80 men were killed and of the sons of Yaakov not one...and Yosef and his brothers the heroes of Egypt set out to confront them..and they killed from them about 600 men all of the heroes of Se'ir the Khorite...and Yosef fought with all of the neighboring enemies and he caus...