Bible Review

Rashi and the traditional Jewish exegetes acknowledge that Rachel could not have functioned as his mother but suggest that Bilhah, Jacob’s concubine, raised Joseph after Rachel’s death and loved him as much as her own sons.

Abraham Ben Isaiah and Benjamin Sharfman, The Pentateuch and Rashi’s Commentary (Brooklyn: S.S. & R. Publishing Co., 1949), p. 373.

Sandor Goodhart, “‘I am Joseph’: René Girad and the Prophetic Law,” Standford French Review 10 (1986), pp. 85–110.

Victor P. Hamilton, The Book of Genesis, Chapters 18–50 (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1995), p. 410.

Robert Alter, The Art of Biblical Narrative (New York: Basic Books, 1981), p. 159.

“The Bible in a New Dress.” Smith’s response was published in “The Smith Sisters—A Correction,” The Woman’s Journal (January 15, 1876). In her translation, Smith even avoided the opportunity to use a feminine plural noun to translate twrcbmh (ham«vas«rot) in Psalm 68:11 (Hebrew Bible 68:12), choosing the neutral form “those” where the English Revised Version used “women.”

Ernest S. Frerichs, The Bible and Bibles in America (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1988), p. 3.

Frederick Grant (Translating the Bible [Greenwich, CT: Seabury, 1961], p. 88), cited in Housley, The Letter Kills, p. 87.

Although Smith attempted to reproduce the Hebrew by omitting the present tense, she could not always sustain the effort, as shown in the first line of this passage. Nevertheless, the omission of the verb in the following clauses does produce an effect that its inclusion would dampen.

Bruce Metzger, “The Revised Standard Version,” The Duke Divinity School Review 44:2 (1979), p. 72.