With this issue of the AJS Review, I bring my editorship to a close. I am proud to present this special issue to the Review's readership. It marks a change from the normal patterns of the Review, in that this issue consists entirely of articles solicited by the editors, revolving around the broad theme of the reverberations of the Bible in modern Hebrew literature and culture.

With this issue, we launch our joint editorship of the AJS Review. It is therefore an appropriate moment to share with our readers our hopes and expectations for the intellectual direction of the journal. Some of what follows has already been articulated in a statement published in the AJS Perspectives (Spring/Summer, 2003) shortly after we assumed our tasks. We feel it bears repeating here for the sake of those who may not have seen the original article.

In the articles gathered here, scholars of Hebrew revisit modern literary works and cultural documents through the prism of their continuing discourse with the Hebraic master narrative, the Bible. These scholars identify twin patterns in modern Hebrew texts: one is of embedding biblical prototypes, dramatic or semantic, in modern writings, while often questioning, challenging, and reversing the ancient models; the other is recreating and foregrounding specific biblical characters, scenes, or images, yet endowing them with a contemporary consciousness or placing them within the current cultural attitudes or mindset. Several contemporary scholars understand this two-pronged pattern, revolutionary and deconstructive as it might seem, within the time-hallowed tradition of midrash. Some find the midrashic mode helpful in interpreting such texts as well as in providing a methodological framework to the critical discourse. Thus, Gershon Shaked suggests in his article that all modern texts displaying this pattern may be viewed as modern midrashim.

Back in 1993, as senior librarian at the Vernadsky Library in Kiev, Ukraine, in charge of cataloguing a newly uncovered Judaica collection, I came across an enigmatic manuscript entitled Sefer ha-ḥeshek. It did not match the bulk of the Judaica holdings. Nor did it fit in Abraham Harkavy's collection of medieval manuscripts. It was too Ashkenazic for Abraham Firkovich's Karaite papers, and too early for most of S. Ansky's nineteenth-century folkloric materials. The manuscript had a wooden cover, separate from the text, with a copper monogram Sefer ha-ḥeshek in Hebrew (hereafter—SH). SH's title appears randomly as a running head; the author occasionally refers to the title of the manuscript. Primarily because of its size—411 folios, 23 of them blank, some 760 filled pages altogether—and due to its magical contents, I discarded any attempts to identify the manuscript as a version of the well-known Sefer ha-ḥeshek, a twenty-or-so-page kabbalistic treatise on the names of the archangel Metatron attributed to Isaac Luria. Also, since the manuscript is not a commentary on the book of Isaiah or Proverbs, it could neither be Solomon Duran's nor Solomon ha-Levi's Ḥ eshek shelomoh.

In her path-breaking study of Israeli women's fiction, Yael Feldman concludes her analysis of Ruth Almog's Roots of Air (1987) with an insightful observation. In this major work, Feldman claims, Almog trespassed into the male writers' territory and became the first among Israeli woman writers to produce an autobiographical fiction of the “portrait of an artist as a young girl.” Feldman concludes that, once the stage of “therapeutic” self-examination, which encompasses “both the oedipal fixation and the daughter–mother identification,” has been completed, “Almog has now embraced the mother in herself.” Indeed, Feldman identifies the next stage in Almog's artistic evolution in her collection of stories, Artistic Mending (1993), suggesting that now the story of another has become the focus of Almog's artistic concern. In Artistic Mending the writer turns her “motherly” attention to life stories of children, mainly second-generation Holocaust survivors, seeking ways to understand, but also “mend” the damaging effects of the tragic historical legacy.

ldquo;In our two thousand years of exile, we have not totally lost our creativity, but the sheen of the Bible dulled in exile, as did the sheen of the Jewish people. Only with the renewal of the homeland and Hebrew independence have we been able to reassess the Bible in its true, full light,” Israel's first Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, wrote in 1953. This statement illustrates several core attitudes of the Jewish national renaissance movement towards the Bible. Ben-Gurion depicted a direct relationship between the state of the Jewish people and the status of the Bible: The two rose and fell together. His words are reminiscent of philosopher Martin Buber, Revisionist leader Zeءev Jabotinsky, and others, all of whom postulated a symbiotic relationship between the Jewish people and the land of Israel: “Just as the Jewish people need the land to live a full life, so the land needs the Jewish people to be complete” wrote Buber. The Bible, according to Ben-Gurion, was the third component of the Jewish “holy trinity” of people, land, and book. It served as testimony of Jewish national life in the land of Israel in former times, as a blueprint for reestablishing this way of life, as proof of a glorious past and promise for the future. It nurtured a national romanticism and both inspired and buttressed universal ideas; it was the bedrock of myth and epos, of earthliness and valor, and also of a system of ethics and faith that rein in and restrain muscle and brawn. It was paradoxical proof of both Jewish uniqueness and Jewish similitude, “like all the nations” (I Samuel 8:5); “materialism” and “spirituality”; historical continuity and historical severance between the people and the land.

Among contemporary literary theorists—and in the humanities in general—theological approaches toward interpretation have been dismissed in favor of hermeneutic models committed to the contingency, partiality, and historicity of all interpretative practice. Against the grain of this tendency, which tends to dismiss all vestiges of theology from postmodern habits of reading and interpretation, critics like Daniel Boyarin and David Stern, have, over the past decades, attempted to recover the distinctly Jewish modes and discourses of reading and interpretation. In the process, they have, as Boyarin himself underlines, introduced a specifically Jewish mode of reading—that of midrash—into the literary theoretical canon.

Canonization of the Bible resulted from a consensus of those to whom it was addressed and a ruling group of religious elites that established its sanctity. They declared that “Torah was given to Moses at Sinai” and valued it above and beyond its literary value. The process of canonization was not a simple one. Several books were included only after struggles among various pressure groups. For example: “At first, Proverbs, Song of Songs and Ecclesiastes were considered non-canonical because they consisted of parables, but later the men of the Great Assembly interpreted them.” (ءAvot dءRabbi Natan, 1). Further: “The sages wished to exclude Ecclesiastes because it contained inconsistencies, but they included it because it begins and ends with teachings of Torah” (Shabbat, 30:b).

Drama is the most neglected genre within Hebrew cultural development. In fact, until shortly before the foundation of the State of Israel, few plays in Hebrew had been staged. Although a large number of works in dramatic form had been written, particularly in the nineteenth century, few of them were viable theatrical dramas. They fell into the categories of rhetoric and allegory, devoid of believable dramatis personae. There were some milestones along the way, such as Somi's Zahut Bedihuta de-Kiddushin (An Eloquent Marriage Farce, c. 1600), Luzzatto's Leyesharim tehilla (Praise for the Righteous, 1743), and some modern plays, but these were not sufficiently feasible for the establishment of a dramatic tradition. An important factor qualifying the late development of Hebrew drama was the language, for within the communities' diglossia throughout the ages, Hebrew was reserved for more elevated discourse than playacting. Moreover, Hebrew, the language of the sacred texts, was inadequate for the expression of everyday life. Nowhere in the diaspora was there a Hebrew-speaking audience; there was no folk life in Hebrew as there was in Yiddish. Also, the potential playwrights were faced with the problem of the divine imperative in Jewish history, which precludes anything like the theodicy that gave rise to classical tragedy. Other religious restrictions against certain forms of representation, together with the small value Jewish religious authorities traditionally placed on theatre for its own sake, were also crucial factors mitigating against the drama's development.

In this paper I will examine the rabbinic exemption of women from the obligation to perform any “positive time-bound commandment” (), as it appears in M. Kiddushin 1:7. This rule states that women are exempt from the obligation to perform those commandments, such as, for example, sitting in a Sukkah on the Feast of Tabernacles, or saying the kriءat shemעa, the declaration of God's Oneness, morning and evening, in which the requirement for the mandated action comes about with the arrival of a specific time. I offer this analysis of a particular rabbinic ruling, in its literary context in the Mishnah, as a case study in what I claim to be a major component of the rabbinic discourse of gender: the male appropriation of the “feminine” into their own identities, and the resultant exclusion of women from those areas of appropriation. In this paper I will employ a literary/anthropological approach to reading the Mishnah, which I believe is very useful in uncovering such underlying cultural patterns within its succinct, legal writing style.

Science and faith were inextricably intertwined in the Latin Middle Ages. Clerics would attend to both spiritual and physical needs because the need to care for the body coincided with the need to care for the soul. Until the rise of universities in the twelfth century, monasteries were the centers of scientific knowledge. And, even after the professionalization of medicine in the thirteenth century, Christian physicians continued to look to the Bible, in addition to their license, as the source of their authority. Indeed, many Christian physicians who received medical degrees went on to pursue higher degrees in theology. It is therefore not surprising that several Christian theologians used medical theories in the service of theology.

No Hebrew reader, at least no reader with some Hebraic literacy, would be able to ignore the strong national resonance of the biblical phrases that Amalia Kahana-Carmon—one of Israel's foremost writers, the recipient of the 2000 Israel Prize—inserted into the masterful opening of the title novella of her 1984 triptych, Up on Montifer. Indeed, the evocative power of these intertexts is inescapable. “עAm levadad yishkon,” a verbatim quote from Balaam's prophecy (Numbers 23:9), is one of the sources for the construction of the Israelite and Jewish national identity, connoting uniqueness, exclusivity, and chosenness. The slightly veiled phrases “עover(et) lifnei hamaḥaneh” and “hanshei ḥalutz kovshim” add allusions to the foundational myth of the conquest of Canaan. In fact, they invoke the story of the tribes Gad and Reuben (Numbers 32), whose role as vanguard, crossing the Jordan before the rest of the Israelites (actually, “before the Lord,” as the biblical text insists), no doubt stands behind the modern Zionist use of the biblical term ḥalutz (vanguard) as “pioneer.”

If quantity is any measure of importance, then Isaac Abarbanel/Abravanel—the fascinating statesman and financier, polemicist and messianic theorist, exegete and philosopher-theologian—has certainly risen very high indeed in the study of medieval Jewish thought. Although never an obscure figure in modern scholarship, having already been the subject of several monographs and dozens of articles, the publication of three books in as many years moves him closer to his more respected predecessors: Maimonides, Gersonides, and Crescas. That there is little overlap in these new books, moreover, which approach the extensive and diverse corpus of Abarbanel's writing in very different ways, shows that this interest in his writings is more than a passing fad. Lawee and Feldman, in particular, not only introduce the reader to various aspects of Abarbanel's life and thought, but point to new areas of research that deserve further investigation. Like any good scholarship, not only do they summarize and synthesize, connecting particular details to larger themes and concerns, but they also challenge conventional views, forcing the reader to return to the sources themselves to look afresh at the writings of this medieval master.

The conclusion of Tmol shilshom is as satisfying as the climax of a Wagnerian opera or a Cecil B. De Mille movie. There is human sacrifice and there are claps of thunder and torrents of rain and cosmic evidence of divine wrath expended and placated. Nor does the novel's melodramatic end fail to satisfy its hyberbolic beginning: Isaac Kumer the naif, whose inflated dream of Zion carried the seeds of its own destruction, is bitten by a mad dog and sacrificed on the altar of the most primitive version of Jewish theodicy.

The Keepers is a concise and informative introduction to the history and religion of the Samaritans, that branch of the Israelite–Jewish religion that has endured from antiquity to the present among a tiny minority in Palestine and Israel. The book is written in an engaging style that will appeal to a public that would not read specialized works on the subject. At the same time, the information contained in the work is reliable and the authors are careful in their discussions of unsolved (and often unsolvable) issues. In an epilogue, Anderson and Giles underline that there remains a “host of unanswered questions about the history and culture of the Samaritan community” and that this book is “only a beginning” (p. 145).

Each of the three childhood stories, S. Y. Agnon's “Bayaעar ūvaעir” [In the Forest and in the Town] (1939), Amos Oz's Panter bamartef [Panther in the Basement] (1995), and Aharon Appelfeld's Layish (1994), offers a child protagonist who inhabits two parallel landscapes: his own environment and the biblical universe. These child protagonists relive a biblical experience, but the degree to which the respective writers make them participants in evoking the biblical sphere is different in each story. These stories exhibit distinctly different paradigms of the art of embedding the biblical text in a modern, secular narrative and of the status it is given within it. In Agnon's tale, the scriptural intertext is inseparable from a dense network of Judaic master texts, discoursing with and commenting on each other. In Oz's novella, the biblical arena is the ancient parallel of present-day reality, the admired yet challenged national epic that mirrors and informs current political and territorial aspirations. In Appelfeld's novella, the biblical pattern is a remote, foreboding myth, not fully recognized by the actors in the modern tale yet powerful enough to hover over them and determine their destiny.

Baskin's book should be required reading, along with the works of Neusner, Boyarin, Wegner, Hauptman, Brooten, and Kraemer, for those interested in Jewish women in late antiquity. It is methodologically sophisticated, yet not jargonistic or overly determined by method or theory. Its limitations are a result of the characteristics of the rabbinic documents, notoriously difficult to use for a comprehensive study on any topic; the vastness and variety of editorial styles of the rabbinic corpus virtually assure that one will both miss relevant data and confront an unmanageable variety of opinions on any given topic.

From its inception in the Enlightenment to this day, modern Hebrew poetry conveys a deep connection to the Bible that manifests itself in a variety of ways. An in-depth understanding of this connection—including its various expressions in content and language, its causes, its purposes, and its manifestations in all the literary genres, in each generation and for each individual writer—would require extensive research that could profitably occupy a large number of scholars. Nonetheless, even with the limited research that I have conducted, focusing on the place of the Bible in Hebrew poetry from the generation of national renaissance to the present time, the substantial anthology of poems that I am preparing for this purpose demonstrate clearly that modern Hebrew poetry constantly returns to the Bible, and that the Bible's oft-lamented decline in stature in Israeli society is nowhere to be seen.

This book contains a full review of Jewish marriage in antiquity, beginning with biblical injunctions, but focusing primarily on postbiblical material and specifically on rabbinic literature. It is divided into three parts: 1. Thinking about Marriage, in which Satlow describes how and why Jewish marriages were planned, 2. Marrying, in which he describes the process of marriage itself, and 3. Staying Married, in which married life and its consequences are at issue. In each of these parts Satlow correctly attempts to draw a line between the ideals of marriage as portrayed in the sources and what actually went on, as far as these allow us a glimpse of reality.

The life story of Jacob, one of the longest and most complex of the Bible narratives, is a mine for the imagination of modern writers. Hebrew writers of poetry and prose have been drawn to Jacob's biblical tale and have made it the overt or latent intertext in their work.