The temptation is overwhelming to excuse or soften the drama of Genesis 22. A leading professor of Jewish thought explains how to get past that, and what meaning lies beyond it.

A reader’s question prompts Philologos to turn up a crucial link between the three.

How many rabbis first translated the Hebrew Bible, and how many different translations did they produce?

And does their presence illuminate the book of Exodus—or is it simply a sign that ancient Egypt was a powerful nation?

A professor of Jewish studies joins us to talk about why the Hebrew Bible sometimes portrays God as a mother, and what that means.

A hue like the sea, the sky, grass, and trees, available for $14.90 per gram at Amazon.

The word, like a small number of other Egyptian loanwords in the Bible, testifies to a period in which the early Israelite nation, or a part of it, was in intimate contact with Egyptian life.

In a rebroadcast, the Israeli intellectual talks about his best-selling book on the revolutionary political ideas in the last speech of Moses.

The language of Homer delights in illuminating the world at length. The language of the Bible, by contrast, is compact, but fraught with the agitated flow of emotions.

The signal achievement of Genesis is to find heroism not just on the field of battle—where Odysseus, too, excels—but on the hardscrabble ground of everyday life.

As the Jewish people begins to celebrate Passover, a political philosopher asks how Exodus can clear up the ways that the left and right misunderstand what it takes to be free.

Why, in the Hebrew Bible and the Odyssey alike, does the overweening human ambition to become somebody end in lowly banishment and dispersion?

One recent Saturday morning, I was following the Torah portion from a late-13th-century manuscript and noticed some strange faded text and stress lines. What did they mean?

“An earthquake in biblical scholarship” is how the discovery has been described. That’s true, as are the connections it reveals between ancient languages and modern ones.