Creating a Date for the Sinai Event
12 Feb 2025
28 Jan 2025
This article was first published on Medium.com
https://medium.com/@chucklightner/the-message-of-the-seventh-plague-0d987b79ff17
11 Dec 2024
This article was first posted on Medium.com. The link below should provide access.
11 Dec 2024
This post about the story of the “Rape of Dinah” was first posted on Medium.com. The link below should provide access.
27 Sep 2024
It is in your mouth, and in your heart - and in the oven of Akhnai
Parashat Nitzavim
In this week’s Torah portion, there is a brief but powerful passage that always attracts attention. This is the text of Deuteronomy 30:11–14:
For this commandment which I command you this day, it is not too hard for you, nor is it too far off. It is not in heaven, that you should say, ‘Who will go u...
29 Aug 2024
Happiness is not experienced before entry into the promised land
That surprised me - and I spend a lot of my time studying those texts.
I recently looked at every use of the Hebrew word meaning “love” in the first five books of the bible. I published that here on August 27.
I then wondered what the same sort of analysis of the Hebrew word for “happy” might show. I think it is equa...
27 Aug 2024
Where is the Love in the Five Books of Moses?
The Hebrew word for love, from the root aleph-heh-vet, or ahav, is not found in the Book of Numbers. There is no love in the wilderness!
Where love is found in the other four books, its message is often unexpected.
Rabbi Jonathan Sacks points out the concentration of uses of the love in the Book of Deuteronomy.[1]
A closer look at a...
28 Jul 2024
Numbers 25 – Israel at Shittim and the Pinchas Episode
In Numbers 25 the Israelites are in Shittim, which is the last stop on their journey through the desert. They are led there into both idolatry and illicit sexual activity by the “daughters of Moab.” Apparently, this is the doing of the prophet Balaam, whose attempts to curse the Israelites had been thwarted by God earlier, in the ac...
15 Jul 2024
The Fiery Snakes of Numbers 21:5-9
Practical magic or retrospective justification?
The Torah portion called Chukkat ( Numbers 19:1–22:1) is full of oddities but perhaps none is more unusual than the account of the fiery snakes in Numbers 21:5–9. The incident occurs in the 40th year of the Israelites wandering in the desert, after the deaths of Miriam and Aaron, and after the ...