To modern readers, the attention the Tanakh pays to the sacrificial slaughter of animals—starting when Noah exits the ark—presents something of a problem since, with exception of Samaritans, these rites are unfamiliar to Jews and Christians.

The Christian Bible scholars Dru Johnson and Matthew Lynch take a careful look at the book of Leviticus and its detailed descriptions of various offerings, and at the ways these have been misunderstood by generations of readers. For instance, they reject the idea that sacrifice is solely about atoning for sin and that the Temple and its rituals are just a series of symbols that need decoding. Instead, they argue that these texts must be understood from the perspective of people who spent most of their lives raising livestock. Lynch and Johnson also construct a parallel to traditional rabbinic arguments about the Oral Torah. (Audio, 61 minutes.)

While I’ve seen much speculation—some reasonable and well informed, some quite the opposite—about why Jerusalem chose Friday morning to begin its campaign against Iran, the most obvious explanation seems to be the most convincing. First, 60 days had passed since President Trump warned that Tehran had 60 days to reach an agreement with the U.S. over its nuclear program. Second, Israeli intelligence was convinced that Iran was too close to developing nuclear weapons to delay military action any longer. Edward Luttwak explains why Israel was wise to attack:

Iran was adding more and more centrifuges in increasingly vast facilities at enormous expense, which made no sense at all if the aim was to generate energy. . . . It might be hoped that Israel’s own nuclear weapons could deter an Iranian nuclear attack against its own territory. But a nuclear Iran would dominate the entire Middle East, including Egypt, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain, with which Israel has full diplomatic relations, as well as Saudi Arabia with which Israel hopes to have full relations in the near future.

Luttwak also considers the military feats the IDF and Mossad have accomplished in the past few days:

To reach all [its] targets, Israel had to deal with the range-payload problem that its air force first overcame in 1967, when it destroyed the air forces of three Arab states in a single day. . . . This time, too, impossible solutions were found for the range problem, including the use of 65-year-old airliners converted into tankers (Boeing is years later in delivering its own). To be able to use its short-range F-16s, Israel developed the “Rampage” air-launched missile, which flies upward on a ballistic trajectory, gaining range by gliding down to the target. That should make accuracy impossible—but once again, Israeli developers overcame the odds.