Lore Segal
By Lore Segal
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Culture The Price of Milk and Honey
Among the chosen with whom, in biblical times, the Lord had conversations, Moses was special. “Your brother,” God says to the rebellious Miriam in Numbers, Chapter 12, “is a familiar within my household. With him I speak not in riddles but mouth to mouth.” In one of these conversations not recorded in any chapter, the…
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News A Spoiled Child
Joseph’s story might be a study in the making of a successful man. He has not only God’s but also his father Jacob’s special favor. If there was ever a child made to feel good about himself, it is the boy Joseph. He wears the outward token of parental love, the coat of many colors…
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News Cruel and Unusual
The modern imagination feels at home with the moral question raised by the Job story: Why do bad things happen to good people? It is a question that does not arise in Deuteronomy, which foresees punishments of spectacular awfulness in retribution upon a nation disobedient to God’s law. What type of disobedience will these calamities…
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Culture Sacred Massacre
The first commandment, which says God is the only God, that He is the God of the Children of Israel whom He brought out of Egypt; that we must worship no other gods and obey His laws, precedes, in order and import, the law to which intuition gives pride of place, the commandment not to…
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Culture The Unclean Body
How interesting that the animal offered for sacrifice was required to be physically flawless, and that the Lord, looking into men’s hearts for a future king of Israel, elected the handsomest and tallest. Can man’s relation with the divine depend on the body‘s soundness and health? There are instances when un-health is used for punishment….
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Culture The Lord and His Children
We must not speculate about the motivations of the ineffable God, but there are the times when He chooses to explain them Himself. Speaking in the ear of Moses, the Lord says that He hardened Egypt’s heart — to its natural degrees of hardness, we might well suppose — so that it required His spectacular…
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Culture Fortunately Unfortunately
Joseph dreams and interprets dreams that are understood to be communications from God. They foretell God’s intention and move God’s narrative forward. If we want to look for human motive, we had better do it in the form of suppositions: Was it innocence, was it a phenomenal lack of tact, or was it testosterone that…
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Culture The Sacred Ménage à Trois
The Bible’s stories tell of lives lived so long ago, in such a different clime, we look for difference and find types of ourselves. There are the women of today who choose to be childless, and there are women for whom childlessness is a calamity. Does their calamity compare with that of the Bible’s barren…
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