A rabbi and Bible scholar joins us to talk about his trips to biblical Egypt, and about the role of Egypt in the Jewish imagination.

One renowned talmudic scholar called the now-beloved prayer a “foolish custom that is not to be followed.” What did he mean and how did it survive?

With the Days of Awe just on the horizon, we rebroadcast a fascinating conversation about the nature of the Jewish Orthodox community and the human capacity for change.

Everyone from Netflix to the Forward is fascinated by the ḥaredi matchmaking system because it rejects liberal norms. Here’s what they’re missing.

A major tenet of rabbinic Judaism is that the Bible is not to be taken literally. But of course that’s not the whole story.

The word, like a small number of other Egyptian loanwords in the Bible, testifies to a period in which the early Israelite nation, or a part of it, was in intimate contact with Egyptian life.

In a rebroadcast, the Israeli intellectual talks about his best-selling book on the revolutionary political ideas in the last speech of Moses.

Jewish history has always known periods in which double naming existed, always in places in which Jews were relatively well-integrated in the non-Jewish society around them.

This week’s podcast guest uncovers the many layers to the biblical book that Jews traditionally read on the upcoming holiday of Shavuot.

How did a small Transylvanian movement become the most powerful player in worldwide ultra-Orthodoxy?

One never hears Jews speak among themselves of Sukkot as the holiday of Booths, or of Rosh Hashanah as New Year’s Day. Why the difference?

As the Jewish people begins to celebrate Passover, a political philosopher asks how Exodus can clear up the ways that the left and right misunderstand what it takes to be free.

One recent Saturday morning, I was following the Torah portion from a late-13th-century manuscript and noticed some strange faded text and stress lines. What did they mean?

“An earthquake in biblical scholarship” is how the discovery has been described. That’s true, as are the connections it reveals between ancient languages and modern ones.