GEN1029 To do justice, as [this verse] shows, means, in Hebrew, as in English, to do what is right: uphold the innocent and condemn the guilty – in a practical way, to recognize their deserts.  Shiftu here connotes recognition of rights, just as the English “condemn” entails not merely judgment but a finding of guilt.   JHRHV 167 n. 25

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GEN1112 See [[GEN1143]] Genesis 22:17 descendants JHRHV 88

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GEN1124 Maimonides does not think that life is a test. He does not believe that God is obligated to requite anyone.  He rejects the rabbinic, midrashic idea of the sufferings of love as unbiblical and untrue. Nowhere in the Torah is this doctrine stated, he says.   Nowhere is it even hinted, except in the binding of Isaac [this Chapter], where the notion has been read into the text quite improperly “that God causes injuries to descend upon a person who has not previously sinned in order to increase that person’s reward.”   Many of the Rabbis, Maimonides explains, rejected this idea of the sufferings of love; and rightly so, for the doctrine is incompatible with God’s justice Guide [for the Perplexed] III, 17, 24. On the contrary, “The biblical principle is diametrically opposite to this view and is enunciated in His words: “A God of faithfulness and without injustice” Deuteronomy 32:4.  JHRHV 68

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GEN1140 Natural theology, I believe, should link the idea of the good with that of God, for the core insight of monotheism is the recognition that God’s commands speak only in behalf of the good.   We can be sure of this nexus, since the idea of goodness is, for monotheists, constitutive in our idea of the divine.   It is this linkage, I have argued, that is intended when Genesis calls the mountain where Abraham did not sacrifice Isaac “the mountain where the Lord revealed Himself” [this verse].   For Abraham was blessed even though he did not carry through his initial intent to sacrifice his beloved son.   Indeed, he was blessed in that very choice, the choice forced upon him when he had to decide between God’s explicit and unambiguous command that he sacrifice Isaac and the angel’s urgent pleas that he refrain from such a horror and do no harm to his son.  His blessing, shared with all nations, lay in the recognition that divine holiness is found not in the tremendum of violence but in acts of kindness, generosity, and justice.  JHRHV xiv

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GEN1143 The Pentateuch does not directly consider intentionally induced abortions.   … That an Israelite parent might consider intentionally aborting a fetus seems almost beyond the moral horizon of the Torah’s original audience.  For in the moral environment where the law was first received, the memory of genocide and infanticide was still fresh Exodus 1:16; every birth was precious.   The Torah vividly articulates the ideals of patriarchal times and the vision of national destiny embedded in those ideals when it voices the loftiest and most sublime blessing to a patriarchal or matriarchal figure in God’s promise:[this verse].   Against this backdrop, the solitary and oblique reference to abortion in Exodus is all the more striking, for it clearly shows that aborticide, even though an assault, is not biblically deemed a homicide—although fatal injury to the expectant mother in such an incident would be.   JHRHV 88

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GEN1167 See [[GEN1143]] Genesis 22:17 descendants JHRHV 88

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GEN1472 In the Torah, the levirate law imputes right to a widow.   She has a right to marriage with her husband’s surviving brother.   We can see that the right is hers, because the shift in priorities that brings the law into disuse is already underway when the biblical legislation is recorded: When marriage to her brother-in-law is not feasible, she is called upon to waive her right, with suitable symbolic acknowledgement of her entitlements Deuteronomy 25:4-10; cf [this verse].  Again, the Torah gives a female war captive the right to mourn her parents for a month before she may be married and insists that she if is espoused, it can only be as a wife, not as mere concubine.   She may be divorced but not sold, “because thou has humbled her” Deuteronomy 21:10-14; Exodus 21:8.  This is not the Geneva Convention, but the law of the “fair captive” is a far cry from Homeric values.  The captive has rights, and shed has them by virtue of her personhood.   JHRHV 60

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GEN1601 Joseph, as the Talmud imagines, might have been seduced by Potiphar’s wife, but for the appearance at the crucial moment of his dead parents’ image at the window.   Why, then, does Joseph’s chastity remain his own? Because it was he who chose to heed the message that he and he alone could see encoded in his mother’s eyes and hear articulated from his father’s lips.  According to the midrash B. Sotah 36b, Jacob appealed to Joseph’s sense of history and destiny; immediately, “his bow abode in strength” [this verse], that is, his lust abated.  But even in this ancient homily Joseph was cautioned, not unmanned.   What the apparition offered him was a choice – inscription of his name on the ephod of the High Priests of its erasure from the stone reserved for it, his virtue blotted out by his dissoluteness, his memory preserved only as a whoremaster Proverbs 29:3.   The cautionary vision clarified Joseph’s choice against a backdrop larger than history – but it did not make his choice for him.   JHRHV 20-1

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