Category: Deep Dives
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She is a Tree of Life for Those Who Grasp Her: Rethinking Wisdom and Torah. Part 4: A Wise Torah
We now have a better appreciation for what might have prompted the author of Jeremiah 8:8 to write “How can you say ‘We are wise, and the torah of the LORD is with us’? The deceitful pen of the scribes has made it into a false witness!” The Korah and quail episodes are part of…
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She is a Tree of Life for Those Who Grasp Her: Rethinking Wisdom and Torah. Part 3: The Character of Moses
In this installment, we will look at how wisdom influences the wilderness narrative, in particular how it is (or is not) embodied in the character of Moses. Torah, Wisely Interpreted The Moses story grew over time, particularly in the wake of Judah’s political demise in 586 BCE, as the need arose to explain this catastrophe…
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She is a Tree of Life for Those Who Grasp Her: Rethinking Wisdom and Torah. Part 2: Wisdom, Torah, and Politics—A Political Reading of the Hezekian Collection
The collection of aphorisms in Proverbs 25–29 begins with a header that identifies it as a product of the state: “These, too, are the sayings of Solomon, which the men of Hezekiah, king of Judah, transmitted” (25:1). This and other headers that structure the book of Proverbs are paratexts that frame the various collections in…
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She is a Tree of Life for Those Who Grasp Her: Rethinking Wisdom and Torah. Part 1: Introduction
I first encountered Hebrew as a member of the Lawrence University Concert Choir in 1991, when we premiered Allen Gimbel’s Three Sacred Pieces with Rinat, the national choir of Israel. Years later, studying wisdom literature with Michael V. Fox, I could finally read for myself the verse I had first sung—עץ חיים היא למחזיקים בה…
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The Siloam Tunnel Inscription: A Multimodal Reading
The text carved on the wall of the Siloam tunnel in Jerusalem is thought to be a watershed in the history of Hebrew prose because it signals a “deictic shift” in West Semitic inscriptions “from the king to the message itself” and gives credit for this engineering marvel to the ordinary people who labored to…
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