by R. Dr. Joshua Berman Why Does King Hezekiah’s Seal Bear an Egyptian Winged Sun God? Hebrew University archaeologists created a stir last week announcing the discovery of a seal bearing the name of the Hezekiah son of Ahaz, the first time a seal bearing the name of a Judean king had been found in the environs of the Temple ...

Why Are Young People Leaving Religion? Insights from an Evangelical Sociologist by R. Dr. Joshua Berman You Lost Me is the title of a recent and provocative book by David Kinnaman, a devout Christian and a sociologist. Through extensive surveys he sought to answer the question that makes up his subtitle: Why Young Christians are Leaving Church and Rethinking Faith. ...

Rabbi Professor Joshua Berman wrote the March essay for Mosaic Magazine about the historicity of the Exodus., Was There an Exodus?, and his follow-up Was Israel Taken out of Egypt, or Egypt out of Israel?. In his essays, Prof. Berman asserts that the Torah was familiar with royal Egyptian propaganda and in broad fashion appropriates motifs and terms from those ...

Professor Joshua Berman with some history-based divrei Torah for your seder.

Kippah and Gown: Rethinking Orthodoxy and Biblical Criticism Essay VIII: Legal Discrepancy in Torah Law as Common-Law Jurisprudence by Joshua Berman In this final essay of this series I suggest a new approach to the presence of contradictory law within the various legal passages of the Torah. My conclusions build upon the ideas presented about the history of law in ...

Kippah and Gown; Rethinking Orthodoxy and Biblical Criticism Essay VII: The Idea of Law in the Tanakh vs. The Idea of Law Today[1. Portions of this essay have appeared previously in my essay What Is This Thing Called Law? The Jewish legal tradition and its discontents] In the previous essay I delineated a critical distinction between two ways of thinking ...

Kippah and Gown: Rethinking Orthodoxy and Biblical Criticism Essay VI: The Discrepancies Between Law in Sefer Devarim and in the Earlier Books of the Torah—The Concept of Law in the Ancient World[1. Portions of this essay have appeared previously in my essay What Is This Thing Called Law? The Jewish legal tradition and its discontents] The difficulties that many sense ...

Kippah and Gown: Rethinking Orthodoxy and Biblical Criticism Essay V: Discrepancies Between Law in Sefer Devarim and the Other Books of the Torah: Laying Out the Questions   1. Introduction to the Series[1. This series is an adaptation of my forthcoming academic study, “The History of Legal Theory and the Study of Biblical Law,” Catholic Biblical Quarterly 76:1 (2014): 19-39.] ...

Kippah and Gown: Rethinking Orthodoxy and Biblical Criticism Essay 4: Historical Discrepancies in Ancient Treaty Literature and in the Torah In this series * Essay 1 * Essay 2 * Essay 3 * Essay 4 In my previous essay we saw how the brit between God and Israel resembles the relationship between a sovereign and vassal in ancient Near Eastern ...

Kippah and Gown: Re-thinking Orthodoxy and Biblical Criticism Essay 3: Brit Sinai in Ancient Context In this series * Essay 1 * Essay 2 * Essay 3 * Essay 4 In this essay we’re going to prepare to address the seeming contradictions between the narrative accounts of Sefer Devarim and the parallel accounts found in the earlier books of the ...