Tanach Thoughts

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...

May this post be in merit of Dror Yisrael ben Rut Miriam (דרור ישראל בן רות מרים) for a successful operation tomorrow and a speedy recovery. "Torat Chaim". "Torat Netzach". Terms that sometimes seem too abstract for my taste. Not everything always seems relevant to our lives, and yet, everything is Torah and therefore everything is the core of life and the essence of infinity. These terms hit hard with the war in Israel, with regards to the parshas we're reading now. Suddenly, every parsha seems to be speaking volumes about dilemmas - moral, practical, halachic, spiritual - we all seem to be facing. For example, Avraham not stopping to think twice before leading his small battalion against a quadruple-sized army to save his close relative Lot - Lots of Israelis did just that during the first few weeks of the war. They dropped everything and marched to war to save their brothers. And how about Yishmael's arc? Yitzchak and Yishmael can only get along when Yish...

Some time ago a friend requested my assistance in tracking down info regarding the idolatrous deity Ba'al Zevuv (Beelzebub). I believe he was interested in modern scholarship on the matter and in particular was hoping there'd be archeological data that would shed light on the mystery. So I rolled up my sleeves and got to work. Spoiler: I didn't find too much, but there are some interesting suggestions out there. Ba'al Zevuv appears in two verses in Melachim 2:1:2-3 : "Ahaziah fell through the lattice in his upper chamber at Samaria and was injured. So he sent messengers, whom he instructed: “Go inquire of Baal-zebub, the god of Ekron, whether I shall recover from this injury.” But an angel of G OD said to Elijah the Tishbite, “Go and confront the messengers of the king of Samaria and say to them, ‘Is there no God in Israel that you go to inquire of Baal-zebub, the god of Ekron?" After which Eliyahu informs Achazyah ( ibid. 4 ): "Assuredly, thus said G OD...

I was going to post this yesterday, but I'm swamped with work...let's just call this the Shushan Purim Isru Chag post...😁 For those who don't know, Dura Europos, a city in eastern Syria, was excavated in the 1930's. One of the most incredible discoveries made there was a well-preserved shul . The shul's walls were decorated with beautiful paintings of scenes from Tanach, such as Eliyahu at Mt. Carmel, the Plishtim being punished for taking the Ark, King David, the First Temple and so forth. One of the most fascinating things about these paintings - which are dated to the years 244-245 CE - is that some of them are based on midrashim. For example, the Eliyahu at Mt. Carmel painting clearly shows Chiel Beit Ha'eli hiding in the Baalic altar and being killed by a snake (alluded to in  Shemot Rabbah 15:16  and  Pesikta Rabbati 4 ; stated explicitly in  Yalkut Shimoni on Nach 214 ). With regards to Purim, there's an honest-to-goodness Purim panel at that shul: ...

This will be a two-post series on the subject of the destruction of Shiloh. More precisely, on the destruction of the Tabernacle at Shiloh. The Tabernacle at Shiloh was constructed already in the days of Yehoshua ( idem. 18:1 ). There it remained until mysteriously disappearing circa the Israelite-Plishtite War in Shmuel 1:4:1-22 . After this war, we do not hear of people coming to the Tabernacle at Shiloh. Instead they go to places such as Nov and Giv'on. The reason was only reported centuries later, in Yirmiyahu 26:1-6  where Hashem tells Yirmiyahu to pass on a prophecy that if the people of the Kingdom of Yehudah do not fix their ways, the Temple will be destroyed just like the Tabernacle in Shiloh (similarly mentioned in ibid. 7:13-15 ). Subsequently, people get angry at Yirmiyahu for having the gall to threaten them with a destruction on par of that of Shiloh ( ibid. 8-9 ). Wait, destroyed? When did that happen?! Actually, this was hinted at already in a Tehillim chapter writt...

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...

 Recently I got into writing short stories about very very minor side-characters in Tanach. I call it "Tanachic fanfiction". Interestingly, I've found that during plotting and writing, I actually think of some interesting chiddushim that could actually be plausible. One was a recent thought about Elkanah, father of Shmuel. It is very noticeable that during the time of the Shoftim, Am Yisrael were not united. From the civil war between Yisrael and Binyamin, including Yavesh Gilad having pulled a Switzerland and opting out of the war (which led to their doom), through the Efraim and Menashe civil war in the time of Yiftach, through tribes that did not join Barak and Devorah in their battle against the Canaanites, and these are just some of the most significant examples. There are many more, both explicit and implicit. A few weeks ago I heard a class by Dr. Chagai Misgav about the religious lives of Yisrael in the time of the Shoftim. He pointed out that leadership at the t...

 As promised yesterday, a cool story about Michmas: Michmas, as we know, was the place where Yehonatan, son of King Shaul, nearly-single-handedly defeated a legion of Plishti soliders ( Shmuel 1:13:16-14:15 ). Many millennia later, another army found victory there, echoing back to the same tactic victoriously wielded by Yehonatan and his arms-bearer. As recounted by Major Vivian Gilbert in " The Romance of the Last Crusade: with Allenby to Jerusalem ", ch. XIII (pg. 180-186): "The first things we bought after the capture of Jerusalem were Bibles and matches. We had recently received a welcome issue of army cigarettes from the base, but the army service corps forgot to send up matches. We used the Bibles as guidebooks to Palestine, and remarkably fine ones they turned out to be! It was wonderfully interesting to read the history of all the places we were visiting daily, and men in the ranks were as keen as the officers. It was no uncommon sight to come across cockney sol...