Wellhausen's dichotomy between law and prophets on the canonical level is blurred by
pentateuchal texts that present Moses as a prophet.
Their topics include the forest and the trees: the place of
Pentateuchal materials in prophecy of the late seventh and early sixth centuries BCE, adjusting social memory in the Hebrew Bible: the Teraphim, the study of the Old Testament and the material imagery of the Ancient Near East: the body parts of the deity, Daniel 5 in Aramaic and Greek and the textual history of Daniel 4-6, and new directions in the computational analysis of biblical poetry.
(25.) I build on the excellent study of the Rashbam by Hanna Liss, Creating Fictional Worlds: Peshat Exegesis and Narrativity in Rashbam's Commentary on the Torah, Studies in Jewish History and Culture 25 (Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2011), which in turn owes a debt to the path-breaking work of Eleazar Touitou's Ha-peshahot ha-mithadeshim be-khol yom: 'Iyyunim beperusho shel Rashbam la-Torah [Exegesis in Perpetual Motion: Studies in the
Pentateuchal Commentary of Rabbi Samuel ben Meir] (Ramat Gan: Bar-Ilan University Press, 2003).
Interestingly, while Gersonides does not mention Miriam's singing in his commentary on the
pentateuchal portion Beshalah (Exod 13:17-17:16), in the tenth lesson (to'elet) to this portion he explains:
(49) Genesis Apocryphon is exceptionally occupied with the ritual purity of Israel and retells the
Pentateuchal stories so as to emphasize that the Hebrew patriarchs come from the uncontaminated line.
Somnolence and an expanding dreamscape in the latter contrast with explosive illuminating glory in the former, yet they are given an equal visual footing, with the effect that the biblical voice of revelation assumes a dialogical quality in keeping with the
Pentateuchal texts.
Polak, "Divine Names, Sociolinguistics and Pragmatics of
Pentateuchal Narrative," in Athalya Brenner and Frank H.
"Radak on Genesis and the Meaningfulness of the
Pentateuchal Text" [Hebrew].
All the main contributors take with utmost seriousness comparative material, especially Mesopotamian; all hold the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch and, with the exception of Longman, the historical existence of Adam and Eve; none makes use of traditional
Pentateuchal sources to resolve problems, and only one (Longman) uses genre in a sense recognizable by most modern scholars.
As Adam Kirsch has recently observed, Professor Alter's "ongoing translation of the Hebrew Bible into a new, more accurate and forceful English version is one of the most ambitious literary projects of this or any age." CCL's Alan Jacobs rejoices that Robert Alter's "climb up the sheer face of the
pentateuchal mount resembles some of the great monuments of humanistic scholarship more than the work of the rabbis."
And there was always the matter of his dutiful relationship to the AbEx patriarchs--Barnett Newman and, with especial rigor, the
Pentateuchal Mark Rothko, before whom Humphrey was virtually immobilized.
Konrad Schmid defends the hypothesis proposed by Peter Frei that Persian officials recognized
Pentateuchal legislation as also the law of the empire.