At least until the 1970s, academic students of the Bible tended to disconnect it from Judaism. Thus, the founder of higher biblical criticism, Julius Wellhausen, made it his goal to find a Protestant inner core buried among later pharisaic, legalistic, and priestly accretions. Later Bible critics, writes Benjamin Sommer, “created a firewall between biblical religion and Jewish culture” by insisting “that it is illegitimate to use rabbinic lenses to look at the Bible, it is pointless to use rabbinic commentaries, and it is perverse to think about the Bible in terms of classical Jewish ideas or values.” According to Sommer, three scholars, all of them Conservative rabbis as well as academics, can take credit for breaking down this firewall and creating a biblical scholarship rooted in critical methods but capable of speaking to believing Jews:

Yochanan Muffs, Moshe Greenberg, and Jacob Milgrom believe[d] that it makes sense to study the Bible in a Jewish context, as part of an ongoing Jewish conversation. To achieve a deeper understanding of the Bible, scholars can and should utilize not only modern critical tools such as archaeology and linguistics but also rabbinic midrash [and] the work of medieval Jewish interpreters (many of whom were themselves superb linguists). Thus, all three of them brought the classical Jewish interpreters back into conversations about the Bible among modern scholars. In so doing, they made clear to their colleagues in the academic world that the Bible is (among other things) a Jewish book. At the same time, they demonstrated something crucial to their fellow Jews (and especially their rabbinic and educational colleagues): Jews who want to study the Bible as their scriptures have much to gain by turning to certain modern scholars. . . .

When one pages through any of Milgrom’s commentaries, [for instance], it immediately becomes clear that he perceives strong elements of continuity between the Bible and Jewish culture in the same way that modern scholars have long perceived continuities between the Bible and ancient Near Eastern cultures. For this reason, in his quest to understand difficult texts from Leviticus and Numbers, Milgrom utilizes comparisons and insights from both rabbinic literature and literature written in Akkadian, Ugaritic, and Hittite (languages of ancient Mesopotamia, northern Canaan, and Asia Minor, respectively). . . .

By using insights he gleans from both types of literature, Milgrom places the Bible on a long trajectory that moves backward from the Bible to the ancient Near East and forward toward rabbinic Judaism. Milgrom shows that just as earlier literature is relevant for understanding the Bible (even though some of it predates the biblical texts by a millennium), so, too, rabbinic works edited a thousand years after the biblical era can enhance our understanding of the Bible.

Analyzing the recent direct Iranian attack on Israel, and Israel’s security situation more generally, Michael Oren looks to the 2015 agreement to restrain Iran’s nuclear program. That, and President Biden’s efforts to resurrect the deal after Donald Trump left it, are in his view the source of the current crisis:

Of the original motivations for the deal—blocking Iran’s path to the bomb and transforming Iran into a peaceful nation—neither remained. All Biden was left with was the ability to kick the can down the road and to uphold Barack Obama’s singular foreign-policy achievement.

In order to achieve that result, the administration has repeatedly refused to punish Iran for its malign actions:

Historians will survey this inexplicable record and wonder how the United States not only allowed Iran repeatedly to assault its citizens, soldiers, and allies but consistently rewarded it for doing so. They may well conclude that in a desperate effort to avoid getting dragged into a regional Middle Eastern war, the U.S. might well have precipitated one.

While America’s friends in the Middle East, especially Israel, have every reason to feel grateful for the vital assistance they received in intercepting Iran’s missile and drone onslaught, they might also ask what the U.S. can now do differently to deter Iran from further aggression. . . . Tehran will see this weekend’s direct attack on Israel as a victory—their own—for their ability to continue threatening Israel and destabilizing the Middle East with impunity.

Israel, of course, must respond differently. Our target cannot simply be the Iranian proxies that surround our country and that have waged war on us since October 7, but, as the Saudis call it, “the head of the snake.”