Marc Michael Epstein, editor of a recent book on Jewish illuminated manuscripts, explains the symbolism used by the artists who designed these works:

The visual culture of Jews is an extension and amplification of their verbal culture. For Jews, art doesn’t merely serve to illustrate texts, . . . it actually becomes exegesis in and of itself. The illustration of the plague of frogs in the Golden Haggadah (Catalonia, ca. 1320) simultaneously illustrates 1) the biblical text, 2) the midrash that speaks of a gigantic frog that emerged from the Nile, . . . from which the other frogs emerged, and, finally, 3) [an invention added by the book’s illustrators] to polemicize against the “pharaohs” of their own time—the distinctly scatological detail of the horde of frogs emerging from the gigantic frog’s rear end.

Or—from the ridiculous to the sublime—[consider] the opening folio of the book of Numbers in the so-called Duke of Sussex Pentateuch, illuminated in the Lake Constance region around 1300, on which four knights hold banners with the symbols of the major tribes camped around each of the four sides of the Tabernacle in the wilderness. The Tabernacle is represented as a word—the opening word of the book of Numbers, vayyedabber, “and he [God] spoke.” It is thus the word of God manifest as the sacred center of everything. It literally stands in for the Tabernacle in the center of the Israelite camp, which was, after all, built to enshrine the tablets of the covenant: a physical manifestation of God’s word. It represents, by extension, the centrality of scripture—of God’s words to Moses—in the Israelite experience, in this biblical book, in the entirety of Pentateuch, and in subsequent Jewish tradition. This concept is profound in itself, but it is most fascinating that the creators of this manuscript chose to represent it visually: they chose to represent the primacy of the word in [Jewish] tradition with an image.

This week, there have been numerous unconfirmed reports about the fate of Esmail Qaani, who is the head of the Quds Force, the expeditionary arm of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards. Benny Avni writes:

On Thursday, Sky News Arabic reported that Mr. Qaani was rushed to a hospital after suffering a heart attack. He became [the Quds Force] commander in 2020, after an American drone strike killed his predecessor, Qassem Suleimani. The unit oversees the Islamic Republic’s various Mideast proxies, as well as the exporting of the Iranian revolution to the region and beyond.

The Sky News report attempts to put to rest earlier claims that Mr. Qaani was killed at Beirut. It follows several reports asserting he has been arrested and interrogated at Tehran over suspicion that he, or a top lieutenant, leaked information to Israel. Five days ago, the Arabic-language al-Arabiya network reported that Mr. Qaani “is under surveillance and isolation, following the Israeli assassinations of prominent Iranian leaders.”

Iranians are desperately scrambling to plug possible leaks that gave Israel precise intelligence to conduct pinpoint strikes against Hizballah commanders. . . . “I find it hard to believe that Qaani was compromised,” an Iran watcher at Tel Aviv University’s Institute for National Security Studies, Beni Sabti, tells the Sun. Perhaps one or more of [Qaani’s] top aides have been recruited by Israel, he says, adding that “psychological warfare” could well be stoking the rumor mill.

If so, prominent Iranians seem to be exacerbating the internal turmoil by alleging that the country’s security apparatus has been infiltrated.