Bible Review

I was surprised to learn that, according to the research of an organization of orthodox Torah scribes, more than 50 percent of the Torah scrolls they checked contained scribal errors; see the comments of Moshe Sokolow in Jewish Book World 15:3 (Winter 1997), p. 16.

Trible, God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1978); and Texts of Terror: Literary-Feminist Readings of Biblical Narratives (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1984).

Phyllis A. Bird, “Images of Women in the Old Testament,” in Religion and Sexism: Images of Woman in the Jewish and Christian Traditions, ed. Rosemary Ruether (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1974).

Phyllis Trible, “Depatriarchalizing in Biblical Interpretation,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion (1973).

P. Kyle McCarter, 1 Samuel, Anchor Bible 8 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1980), pp. 49–50, 53–54, 56.

But see Josephus, Antiquities 5.347; the apocryphal (deuterocanonical) Wisdom of Sirach 46:13; and Mishnah Nazir 9:5, which refer to Samuel as a Nazirite.

Why he hits twice is unclear. I imagine Moses striking as he says “this rock” (hassela’ hazzeh), a blow per word. Abraham ibn Ezra (c. 1150) suggested that nothing happened after the first blow. If so, the scene is almost comic.

“We” may refer to Moses and God or to Moses and Aaron.