Project MUSE®: Hebrew Studies - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/512
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in Hebrew Studies.daily12026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 31 (1990) through current issueLatest Articles: Hebrew StudiesTWOProject MUSE®Hebrew Studies2158-16810146-4094Latest articles in Hebrew Studies. Feed provided by Project MUSE®Symposium on the Characterization of Yhwh and Moses in Conflict (Crisis) in the Pentateuch
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/976426
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In the aftermath of World War II, the study of biblical narrative has changed markedly as interpreters have increasingly shifted their focus away from the historical concerns of the early Enlightenment, with its concern for the diachronic issues of textual composition and the role of the (original) author, to synchronic concerns that have emphasized literary formation and the role of the reader in interpretation. Pre-war interpretation focused especially on reconstructing the original text of the Bible, based on careful study of form, setting, genre, and the various textual versions in an effort to recover the original forms of the texts and the intentions of their presumed authors. Post-war interpretation has
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/512/image/coversmallSymposium on the Characterization of Yhwh and Moses in Conflict (Crisis) in the Pentateuch2025-12-16text/htmlen-USSymposium on the Characterization of Yhwh and Moses in Conflict (Crisis) in the Pentateuch2025-12-162025TWOProject MUSE®244592026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002025-12-16Moses and God: Where Characterization Meets Theology
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/976427
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In his book, Anselm: Fides Quarens Intellectum, Karl Barth claims that, "[t]heological statements as such are contested statements – challenged by the sheer incomparability of their object."1 To restate that a little more prosaically: it is difficult to say anything about God. Nevertheless, the present essay will attempt to say something about God by saying something about Moses. A substantive idea explored in this essay is helpfully expressed by the idea of the meeting of characterization and theology. This has two senses. On the one hand, this essay will explore the significance of character analysis on the character of God.2 On the other hand, the present study will explore the overlapping characterization of
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/512/image/coversmallMoses and God: Where Characterization Meets Theology2025-12-16text/htmlen-USMoses and God: Where Characterization Meets Theology2025-12-162025TWOProject MUSE®952822026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002025-12-16Divine Anger, Divine Favor, and the Ongoing Dynamics of Intercession: Comparing the Moses Yhwh Relationship in Exodus 32–34 and Numbers 11
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/976428
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Within Pentateuchal studies, Numbers 11 often receives attention on two fronts. On the one hand, the chapter presents a complicated picture of Moses in his interaction with Yhwh over the people, raising questions of composition for some. On the other hand, following the extensive architectural, legal, and genealogical material stretching from Exodus 35 – Numbers 10, Numbers 11 noticeably shifts back to the narrative form and reintroduces a rebellion motif, both between the people and Yhwh and between Moses and Yhwh, as Torah ranges into Israel's wilderness wanderings. In light of this shift, some interpreters wonder about the chapter's place and function in Torah. Such discussions are valuable and advance our
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/512/image/coversmallDivine Anger, Divine Favor, and the Ongoing Dynamics of Intercession: Comparing the Moses Yhwh Relationship in Exodus 32–34 and Numbers 112025-12-16text/htmlen-USDivine Anger, Divine Favor, and the Ongoing Dynamics of Intercession: Comparing the Moses Yhwh Relationship in Exodus 32–34 and Numbers 112025-12-162025TWOProject MUSE®1207862026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002025-12-16How and Why Does God Change? Exploring the Logic of the Divine Shift After the Golden Calf
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/976429
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God is rarely characterized directly in the Hebrew Bible. The character of Yhwh is more typically revealed only indirectly, a matter of showing more than telling. It is usually by attending to how God acts and speaks in biblical narratives that we can discern what God is like.2 It is also possible to attend to God's instructions in the Torah and the moral challenge of the Prophets, in order to extrapolate to underlying assumptions of what God values – and thus of the divine character.3 Most work on the characterization of God has, however, focused on biblical narrative.4One of the few places where God's character is explicitly stated is Exod 34: 6–7, when God addresses Moses after the golden calf episode. This
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/512/image/coversmallHow and Why Does God Change? Exploring the Logic of the Divine Shift After the Golden Calf2025-12-16text/htmlen-USHow and Why Does God Change? Exploring the Logic of the Divine Shift After the Golden Calf2025-12-162025TWOProject MUSE®615222026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002025-12-16Yhwh's Defense of Moses in Numbers 12
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/976430
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One of the many problems evident in the Book of Numbers is the interpretation of Numbers 12. When Miriam and Aaron speak against Moses because Moses married a Cushite woman, Yhwh makes an appearance to confront the dissatisfied siblings and to assert that Yhwh will speak with Moses mouth to mouth whereas Yhwh will speak with other prophets, apparently including Miriam and Aaron, in visions and dreams in accordance with Yhwh's usual procedures. To underscore the divine response, Yhwh afflicts Miriam with leprosy, presumably to contrast her resulting white skin with the dark skin of Moses's Cushite wife, and then reprimands her by excluding her from the camp for a period of seven days.Most interpreters agree that the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/512/image/coversmallYhwh's Defense of Moses in Numbers 122025-12-16text/htmlen-USYhwh's Defense of Moses in Numbers 122025-12-162025TWOProject MUSE®559012026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002025-12-16The Deep Structure of Lamentations 2:1–10 and the Saga of Impassability
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/976431
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Literary approaches to poetic texts may reveal profound concepts that could remain unnoticed by external/internal parallelisms or structural-analytic methods.1 In the so-called poetic sections of the Hebrew Bible, the structure for a given pericope may be identified by features other than parallelism, syntax, word order formulas, or strophic patterns.2 This paper aims to identify the deep structure – the literary edifice of Lam 2:1–10 – by attending to delimitation in third person, segmentation by leitmotif, and the complex of finality. The arguments for each are based on grammatical, semantic, and contextual grounds corresponding to the conceptual milieu of the Hebrew Bible in Lamentations. The first section
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/512/image/coversmallThe Deep Structure of Lamentations 2:1–10 and the Saga of Impassability2025-12-16text/htmlen-USThe Deep Structure of Lamentations 2:1–10 and the Saga of Impassability2025-12-162025TWOProject MUSE®1494212026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002025-12-16Poetic Patterns and Constituent Order in Biblical Hebrew
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/976432
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Readers of literature approach texts with expectations regarding both form and function. Within a given culture, literary conventions become entrenched to satisfy readership by fulfilling these expectations. Consider the following lines of "The Northern Lass" by Robert Burns:1
Tho' cruel fate should bid us part,
    Far as the pole and line;
Her dear idea round my heart
    Should tenderly entwine.
Tho' mountains rise, and desarts howl,
    And oceans roar between;
Yet, dearer than my deathless soul,
    I still would love my Jean.
The four-line units contain end-rhyme on both the first and third lines, and the second and fourth lines. This creates coherence between the two halves and the expectation – when
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/512/image/coversmallPoetic Patterns and Constituent Order in Biblical Hebrew2025-12-16text/htmlen-USPoetic Patterns and Constituent Order in Biblical Hebrew2025-12-162025TWOProject MUSE®1245542026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002025-12-16On the Consolidation of Grammatical Terminology in Medieval Hebrew: The Case of Yehuda Hadassi's System
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/976433
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The purpose of this article is twofold: first, to focus attention on the development of Hebrew terminology in the Middle Ages, to its importance in the study of the grammar of language, and to the queries that research should deal with in order to understand it. The formulation of grammatical terms in Hebrew started with the beginning of Hebrew grammatical writings and even before. Grammatical terms are already present in Tannaitic and Talmudic literature, as well as in Masora and Gaonic literature. But its consolidation, its move from mere words to established concepts, is a testament to the linguistic work of the medieval sages. Some Hebrew grammatical terms originate in Karaite literature, including sources
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/512/image/coversmallOn the Consolidation of Grammatical Terminology in Medieval Hebrew: The Case of Yehuda Hadassi's System2025-12-16text/htmlen-USOn the Consolidation of Grammatical Terminology in Medieval Hebrew: The Case of Yehuda Hadassi's System2025-12-162025TWOProject MUSE®928732026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002025-12-16The Grammaticalization Path of WH-Expletive Negation Constructions: From a Question Construction to an Adverbial Discourse Marker – The Case of Hebrew
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/976434
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Previous work on the issue of wh-expletive negation has suggested various explanations for the existence of the supposedly "unnecessary" negation. This paper, however, will claim that the negative force actually exists in the case of wh-based expletive negation in Hebrew, based on the diachronic linguistic evolution of positive wh-exclamatives on the one hand, and the linguistic evolution of negative wh-exclamatives on the other hand.Rhetorical questions can be defined as "questions used for rhetorical Purposes" and these are found on a wide spectrum.1 If a 17-year-old boy comes home late at night and his mother says to him "where have you been?!," she does not only wish to gain information (about where he has
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/512/image/coversmallThe Grammaticalization Path of WH-Expletive Negation Constructions: From a Question Construction to an Adverbial Discourse Marker – The Case of Hebrew2025-12-16text/htmlen-USThe Grammaticalization Path of WH-Expletive Negation Constructions: From a Question Construction to an Adverbial Discourse Marker – The Case of Hebrew2025-12-162025TWOProject MUSE®1300232026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002025-12-16The Biblical Hebrew Verb: An Inconsistent linguistic Introduction?
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/976435
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The Biblical Hebrew Verb: A Linguistic Introduction is the latest of John Cook's publications on the Biblical Hebrew (BH) verbal system. In contrast to other monograph-length treatments such as Cook (2012), however, the present volume "aim[s] to fill a niche that lies between textbook treatments of the BH verb and scholarly treatises on the verb" (p. xvii). Cook defines this "division between textbook and treatise as the difference between description and explanation" (p. xviii), such that the student desiring to move beyond textbook descriptions of the semantics of the BH verb is encouraged to enter the realm of "understanding the various factors that explain how that meaning is composed" (p. xviii). Crucially
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/512/image/coversmallThe Biblical Hebrew Verb: An Inconsistent linguistic Introduction?2025-12-16text/htmlen-USThe Biblical Hebrew Verb: An Inconsistent linguistic Introduction?2025-12-162025TWOProject MUSE®636212026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002025-12-16Canonicity Spaces: Nation, Translation and Imagination
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/976436
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Literary canonization bears a compelling affinity with the logic of tribe and nation. Both involve processes of consolidation: canonization around a perceived literary center, nationalism around an imagined collective identity. Yet, in each case, peripheral texts persist, challenging or exceeding the core. This relationship operates both metaphorically and metonymically: the group shapes the canon in its own image, and the canon, in turn, reinforces the group within a complex system of authority, power, and sovereignty. Not coincidentally, Albert Thibaudet's concept of La république des professeurs, later adopted by Dan Miron for Hebrew literary criticism, exemplifies this dynamic.Scholarly engagement with the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/512/image/coversmallCanonicity Spaces: Nation, Translation and Imagination2025-12-16text/htmlen-USCanonicity Spaces: Nation, Translation and Imagination2025-12-162025TWOProject MUSE®443392026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002025-12-16"One Can Live Even with a Dead Person": On Guy Ehrlich's The Empty Places of Yehudit Hendel
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/976437
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In her book The Other Power (1984), the writer Yehudit Hendel (1921–2014) devotes herself to writing her memories of painter Zvi Meirovich, who was her partner and whom she married in 1948. Meirovich's death at the end of 1974, led Hendel into an extended period of mourning. After her death in the summer of 2014, her son, Shuki Meirovich, reflected on her grief: "My mother, all those years she was in deep mourning, she basically never recovered from my father's death until her last day"2 (Meirovich, 2014, 12). Out of devotion to her mourning, Hendel describes her husband's memory in The Other Power, not to bid him farewell, but to keep him alive. Hendel's description of the poet Amir Gilboa's visit to Meirovich's
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/512/image/coversmall"One Can Live Even with a Dead Person": On Guy Ehrlich's The Empty Places of Yehudit Hendel2025-12-16text/htmlen-US"One Can Live Even with a Dead Person": On Guy Ehrlich's The Empty Places of Yehudit Hendel2025-12-162025TWOProject MUSE®452372026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002025-12-16Aramaic Loanwords and Mishnaic Hebrew Lexicography
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/976438
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Although Aramaic loanwords in Biblical Hebrew (BH) have been explored,1 those in Mishnaic Hebrew (MH) have not been given much attention.2 But Aramaic loans in MH are a clue to its history, and the history of Mishnaic Hebrew, interesting in itself, may tell us something about the history of earlier Hebrew. Edward Ullendorff said that
BH, in all its linguistic aspects, can only be properly understood and appreciated in conjunction with the resources of Mishnaic Hebrew, the language which, on the one hand, contains so much that is merely fortuitously not attested in the O[ld] T[estament] and which, on the other hand, represents the natural continuation of BH.3
Although MH probably does contain many words used in
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/512/image/coversmallAramaic Loanwords and Mishnaic Hebrew Lexicography2025-12-16text/htmlen-USAramaic Loanwords and Mishnaic Hebrew Lexicography2025-12-162025TWOProject MUSE®426272026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002025-12-16Contours of an Ancient Jewish Exegetical Tradition Spanning Time, Place, and Language
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/976439
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Menahem Kister's new book tackles a central question: What is the relationship between midrash found in rabbinic texts and midrash found in Second Temple period texts, including Hellenistic works like Philo, sectarian works from Qumran, as well as apocrypha and pseudepigrapha? His answer in one sentence: They all develop out of a common exegetical tradition, not just in method, but in specific midrashic readings.Though many scholars have touched on the connection between various strands of ancient Jewish literature – Vered Noam's studies being, perhaps, the most obvious and extensive1 – the perspective and scope of Kister's book is reminiscent of James Kugel's 1,000-page oeuvre, Traditions of the Bible (1998)
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/512/image/coversmallContours of an Ancient Jewish Exegetical Tradition Spanning Time, Place, and Language2025-12-16text/htmlen-USContours of an Ancient Jewish Exegetical Tradition Spanning Time, Place, and Language2025-12-162025TWOProject MUSE®397162026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002025-12-16Reframing the Shtetl for Post-Holocaust American Jewish Audiences: Salvage Poetics
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/976440
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In Summer 2020, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, I received the gift of several boxes of books from Irving Levitt Z"L's library, courtesy of his daughter, my friend and colleague Laura Levitt. This private Jewish library, particularly welcome at a time when institutional libraries were closed, included translations of Martin Buber's tales of the Hasidim and Yiddish literary classics by authors such as Sholem Aleichem and I. L. Peretz. A year later, going through my late grandmother's estate, I similarly encountered books about Eastern Europe designed for mid-century American Jewish readers, including Maurice Samuel's The Prince of the Ghetto and Bella Chagall's Burning Lights. At the time, I whimsically
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/512/image/coversmallReframing the Shtetl for Post-Holocaust American Jewish Audiences: Salvage Poetics2025-12-16text/htmlen-USReframing the Shtetl for Post-Holocaust American Jewish Audiences: Salvage Poetics2025-12-162025TWOProject MUSE®132702026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002025-12-16When a Jewish Historian and an Archeologist Meet in a Roman Bathhouse
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/976441
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This latest publication by Yaron Eliav represents the culmination of his extensive research into Jewish culture in Roman Palestine, evidenced by rabbinic literature and archaeological findings. This book was properly defined by Peter Schaefer, quoted on the cover, as a product of the integrative approach of an author who is well-informed in Greco-Roman literature, rabbinic literature, and archaeology. These three important sources for the study of the history of Jews in the Land of Israel sometimes complement, but frequently contradict each other. Eliav clearly prefers to read the fields of knowledge as complementing each other, generously borrowing from Roman sources to portray a late antique Jew in the Roman
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/512/image/coversmallWhen a Jewish Historian and an Archeologist Meet in a Roman Bathhouse2025-12-16text/htmlen-USWhen a Jewish Historian and an Archeologist Meet in a Roman Bathhouse2025-12-162025TWOProject MUSE®378502026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002025-12-16Reconstructing the Original Text of Daniel 1–7
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/976442
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Benjamin Suchard's monograph on the Aramaic portion of the Book of Daniel is an important contribution to the study of the Book of Daniel itself. The research applied the approach that includes linguistic, literary, textual and historical aspects of the textual formation of this biblical book and deserves scholarly attention as research of paramount importance.The innovation of this study lies in the creation of a complete reconstructed text of the original, with its own textual apparatus, methodology of linguistic reconstruction and commentaries. Such an eclectic approach is new in the field of biblical studies, since traditionally the problems of textual criticism have been solved by commenting on fragments that
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/512/image/coversmallReconstructing the Original Text of Daniel 1–72025-12-16text/htmlen-USReconstructing the Original Text of Daniel 1–72025-12-162025TWOProject MUSE®944462026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002025-12-16