Carasik, Michael

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I'm a biblicist by training, with secondary interests throughout Jewish studies of the pre-modern era. I teach Biblical Hebrew at the University of Pennsylvania and the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College. My current publication for a general audience is The Bible's Many Voices, forthcoming in 2014 but available now for pre-order
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  • Publication
    Review of Yairah Amit, Shoftim (Judges: Introduction and Commentary)
    (2000-01-01) Carasik, Michael
    Let me begin my review of Yairah Amit's Judges volume in the Mikra LeYisra'el commentary series by making an admission which, rumor says, more of my fellow reviewers make than do: I have not read this book--not, at any rate, from cover to cover. I make this admission with a clear conscience because of the hybrid nature of the commentary form, part introductory material, part reference work. What I have done, therefore, is to read the book's introduction and to use the rest of the book as its owners and borrowers will do, by consulting the commentary, the fifteen excurses, and the eight indexes (to biblical references, extra-biblical literature, textual witnesses, emendations, structural/redactional terms, religious terms, grammatical terms, and geographical names). My purpose was to get a sense of how useful the volume will be for me--and hence, I hope, for the typical reader of Hebrew Studies.
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    Exegetical Implications of the Masoretic Cantillation Marks in Ecclesiastes
    (2001-01-01) Carasik, Michael
    A rabbinic tradition preserved in b. Yoma 52a-b suggests that five biblical verses are "undecidable"--that is, it is not clear how they ought to be punctuated. This makes evident a fact that is not often noticed: the Masoretic punctuation of the Bible is sometimes exegetical in character. Simcha Kogut, in his recent book Correlations between Biblical Accentuation and Traditional Jewish Exegesis, has shown that the biblical text is sometimes punctuated "against" the peshat, the meaning which a "reasonable" reader would assume to have been intended by the author. Such punctuation is a silent commentary. The reason for it is not explained; but it would seem to be prompted by a desire to shape the meaning of the text, often to match it in an interpretation found in rabbinic literature. Choon-Leong Seow's recent Anchor Bible commentary on Ecclesiastes notes over a dozen probable or possible places in that book where biblical scholars have suggested that the Masoretic punctuation does not match the intended meaning of the text. The purpose of this paper is to analyze these cases to determine whether any of these examples were indeed prompted by exegetical concerns. In several cases, the Targum to Ecclesiastes translates the same word twice--that is, they translated simultaneously in accordance with two different decisions about how the verse should be punctuated. I suggest that, in many cases, the Masoretic decision to place a pause in a location that seems to contradict the peshat was similarly made not to contradict it, but to add a second possibility. Despite the restrictive quality of the vowels and punctuation marks which the Masoretes added to the traditional consonants, they may, paradoxically, have been actuated by a desire to preserve the indeterminability of the text.
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    Janus Parallelism in Job 1:20
    (2016-01-01) Carasik, Michael
    In Job 1:20, Job performs four actions: 1) he rends his garment; 2) he shears his head; 3) he falls to the ground; and 4) he prostrates himself. The third of these can be read either (with the first two) as an act of mourning or (with the last) as an act of worship. I suggest that this is a deliberate literary choice: the poetic technique of Janus parallelism. Since Janus parallelism has already been demonstrated to be both frequent in the book of Job and significant for its meaning, this unexpected Janus parallelism in the prose portion of the book confirms that those chapters are not an early survival but a creation of the author of the book as a whole.
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    Review of William P. Brown, Character in Crisis: A Fresh Approach to the Wisdom Literature of the Old Testament
    (1997) Carasik, Michael
    "In American society renewed interest in the value of character has recently galvanized public and political discussion" (p. vii). Now William P. Brown, associate professor of Old Testament at Union Theological Seminary in Virginia, has written a volume which looks at Proverbs, Job, and Ecclesiastes, the three pillars of biblical wisdom literature, through the lens of character. The aim of his study is "to demonstrate that the idea of character constitutes the unifying theme or center of the wisdom literature, whose raison d'être is to profile ethical character" (p. 21). The book is divided into six chapters. An introduction and a brief conclusion surround chapters on each of the biblical books; Job is treated in two separate chapters.
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    Midrash: The Story Behind the Story
    (2003-01-01) Carasik, Michael
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    Review of Michael V. Fox, Character and Ideology in the Book of Esther
    (2003-01-01) Carasik, Michael
    At the 2001 meeting of the Association for Jewish Studies, Michael Fox described this book as his only "Jewish" commentary. Now reprinted by a Christian publisher, in 1991 it was the only commentary on Esther written by a Jew for a general audience. (It has since been joined by Jon Levenson's commentary in the Old Testament Library series.) He ends his introduction with the remark that the book does not address the most urgent and vital aspect of the meaning of the Scroll, "its existential bearing on the individual reader" (p. 11). For his own part, he feels the anxiety of the Jews of Persia and shares their exhilaration at their deliverance. "Except that i do not think 'their,' but 'my'" (p. 11). The book performs the remarkable and necessary feat of remaining skeptical about the historicity of the Esther story while taking its thoughts about the threat of genocide against the Jews with utmost seriousness. (Fox's excursus dealing with feminist readings of the book finds them "indifferent to the severity of the crisis that stands at the story's heart: the mortal danger to the Jewish people" [p. 208].) The major question of the book, "How can Jews best survive and thrive in the diaspora?" (p. 4), is still a question today. Esther's liturgical role in the celebration of Purim is an excuse for most of us not to think seriously about the book. Fox's approach is quite different; for him, Xerxes' combination of "petty impulses and mental sloth" (p. 175) is Hannah Arendt's "banality of evil."
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    Three Biblical Beginnings
    (2002-01-01) Carasik, Michael