On a hot August day in the Galilee, a group of schoolchildren in the Arab Christian village of Jish counted diligently, from one to 10, after their instructor. But the words, though similar to Arabic and Hebrew, were neither. ”Chada, tarteyn, telat, arba, khamesh,” they recited, ”shet, shva, tamney, teysha, asar.” At this unique summer…
‘In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.” As often as we read these words, which we do every Simchat Torah when beginning the…
In God’s Shadow: Politics in the Hebrew Bible. By Michael Walzer Yale University Press, 256 pages, $28.00 In the early 1980s, the late Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin was slugged by many American Jews for what some on the American Jewish center-left perceived as an unsavory embrace of Fundamentalist Christians, who had expressed warm support…
In response to my column of two weeks ago in which I objected to the use by Jews of the term “Old Testament,” several of you have expressed the opinion that the best alternative to it is “Hebrew Bible.” Miriam Segall of Minneapolis, on the other hand, wants to get even more Jewish that that….
It is a typical, even stereotypical, West Bank settlement scene: bearded young men pruning vines while enthusing about the Chosen People’s God-given right to this region. But in this case it is Jesus, and not Jewish identity, that animates these tillers. For years, Westerners have flocked to the Israeli-occupied West Bank to help Palestinians with…
For a while now I’ve been hearing about a new translation of the Hebrew Bible, called Tanach Ram. (Tanakh, of course, is Hebrew for “Bible,” an acronym composed of Torah, the Five Books of Moses; Nevi’im, the Prophets, and K’tuvim, the other biblical writings, while Ram is the name of an Israeli publishing house.) What…
Reader Peter Siegel is upset by my November 11 column, titled “From Bono to Yahweh.” (Online it was called “How Yahweh Got Its Verbal Vibe Back.”) He writes: Why in the world would your article and title include a spelling of the name of G-d that offends many, many Jews from Orthodox to Reform, who…
As this year marks the 400th anniversary of the King James Version of the Bible, a new English translation might seem a bit late to the game. After all, the KJV is justly celebrated for its eloquence, and the shelves are packed with more recent translations, such as that of the Jewish Publication Society, that…
די ווילנער דאָקטוירים יעקבֿ וויגאָדסקי און צמח שאַבאַד זענען אויך געווען געזעלשאַפֿטלעכע טוער.
יעקבֿ פֿינקלמאַן באַשרײַבט אויך זײַן לאַנגיאָריקן פֿאַך — ווי ער האָט צוגעשטעלט וויסן אין טעלעקאָמוניקאַציע איבער דער וועלט
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