Leon R. Kass— Exodus, the second of the Five Books of Moses (The Torah), contains some of the most famous stories in Western literature: the enslavement of the Children of Israel by Pharaoh in Egypt, the rescue of baby Moses from the Nile by Pharaoh’s daughter, God’s call to Moses
Edward L. Greenstein— Determining the time and place of the book’s composition is bound up with the nature of the book’s language. The Hebrew prose of the frame tale, notwithstanding many classic features, shows that it was composed in the post-Babylonian era (after 540 BCE). The poetic core of the
David Wolpe— We wish our heroes to be attractively flawed: brave but heedless, good but confused, wise yet inexplicably sad. A minor crack in character makes the vessel seem that much more precious. Still, while acknowledging the complexity behind the clarity of Lincoln, or the darkness that lurked beneath Churchill’s
Follow @yaleSCIbooks In the epigram to Christian de Duve’s Genetics of Original Sin: The Impact of Natural Selection on the Future of Humanity we find a verse from the book of Genesis in the Hebrew Bible where “the woman” eats the forbidden fruit of the tree, then gives it to the
The Hebrew Bible, the twenty-four books that make up the Old Testament of the Christian Bible, tell the stories of the creation of the earth and the founding of the Jewish religion. In God’s Shadow: Politics in the Hebrew Bible, Michael Walzer engages in a decade-long process of researching how politics
Only rarely in biblical scholarship does a book come along that topples a monolith of scholarly consensus. Resurrection and the Restoration of Israel: The Ultimate Victory of the God of Life, a new book by Harvard professor Jon D. Levenson that explores the origins of the Jewish notion of the