Where the story turns

Not the dream, not the pit — the annotation puts the turn at the father's preference itself. Everything that follows is already contained in a parent loving one child visibly more than the others.

The resolution of the whole Joseph narrative, and the verse is fully flagged. Note what it does not say: not that the evil was secretly good, but that two intentions ran through the same events.

Before a single plague, the terms are set — and set in family language rather than legal language. Everything Pharaoh subsequently loses is foreshadowed in one clause.

Moses offers his own erasure in exchange for the people who have just betrayed him. An unfinished sentence in the Hebrew — he breaks off mid-offer — and the annotation flags every word of it.

A quiet aside in a famous story, and marked as fully climactic. It explains why the boy keeps running to the wrong man: the problem is not that he will not listen but that he cannot yet tell who is speaking.

The hinge of the books of Samuel and one of the hardest verses in the Hebrew Bible to sit with. Fully flagged, and placed immediately after David's anointing — the annotation ties the two together.

David stops fasting once the child is dead. The verse everyone finds strange when they first read it, and the annotation treats it as the climax rather than the death itself.

Naomi's bitterest sentence, and the one that names the book's actual problem. She asks to be called Mara. The narrator never does — and it is worth noticing how long the story takes to answer her.

The commission, fully flagged, and everything in the book is a reaction to it. Jonah's very next word in Hebrew is 'and he rose' — he obeys the verb and reverses the direction.